Jansy Mello: Like B. Carp (perhaps), I think the narrator seems to be more sensitive to the old lady's predicaments: her family is now reduced to an almost absent brother-in-law,a psychotic son and a baby-like toothless gaping husband ( formerly a successful businessman in Europe), who spells labels while moving his lips, ignores his wife's hand-to-heart admission of fright to continue with his manic monologue. We also learn from him that the old man has not acquired as good a mastery of English and phone-call procedures as shis wife has. He takes an almost childish delight in the jelly jars and is capable to enjoy a "festive" midnight tea with his wife. The wife is accomodating and usually docile and compassionate.He apparently he keeps the set of keys to the flat and lends them to her once in a while, holds the umbrella and worries about their son (at least, we know that he fears being held responsible about something related to the boy). The old lady might have unconsciously wished to hear the phone bring news about her son's successful attempt at suicide ( it is impossible to know!)

A Brazilian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Luiz F. Gallego Soares,after reading "Signs and Symbols" exclaimed: "Meu Deus, que tristeza infinita! É uma das coisas mais tristes que eu já li" ( My God, such an infinity of sadness! This is one of the saddest stories I've ever read))

According to him VN's short-story revolves around the axis formed by family blood-ties and ambivalent affection. VN's language is as cutting as a bistoury and the reader finds no sentimental gushings nor affectation even though the plot is still capable to cut into the hardest of hearts. He said: "This story hurts me, using Ingmar Bergman's words,'as a tooth-ache in the soul'." For him, the young man's psychosis ( its hopeless prognostic) and the old couple's ravages by age and destitution, create a purgatory that encompasses their entire life - a life devoid of hope of any kind of heavenly comfort. The boy's psychosis represents an irreparable loss to the couple.(and even the boy wants to drill a hole and escape from the world. ..btw, what a cretin that doctor, the one who said that his suicide attempt was a "masterpiece of inventiveness"!!!)"

"The clinical picture described in the story suggests 'paranoid schyzophrenia', something not at all as rare as that guy Herman Brink asserted. The only atypical feature derives from something about this patient's delusions because he excludes people altogether to set the focus onto nature. This may be the result of having his self so fragmented and projected outwards that its pieces are then intermingled with the landscape. Nature can divine his innermost thoughts because they became a part of the scenery. The basic event, from a phenomenological stand-point, such as Karl Jaspers' - is the loss of the "awareness of self" ( in the sense of an opposition between Self-Non Self). Jaspers considers that these alterations are exacerbated in schizophrenic processes and lead to: (a) a loss of identity; (b) a loss of the unity of the self; (c) a loss of the self's independent activity ( external forces are felt as prodding the individual into action) and (d) the loss of boundaries between self-non self ( including the sinesthaesias and the "publication of his thoughts"). These disturbances pertain to a formal dimension of being in the world and, although the boy doesn't seem to extend his perceptions and delusional interpretations towards people, we may observe in him the presence of ideas of "grandeur" at the back of his persecutory feelings. A paranoid idea of grandeur always carries along feelings of persecution. The boy must also suffer from auditive hallucinations because he can hear the conversation that takes place in the clouds."

"Nabokov presents a masterful rendering of the psychotic apprehension of the world. He achieves that mainly because he alternates descriptions about how the boy sees his environment with his mother's normal daily routine (at least, as it reaches the reader through the narrator). There are no delusions there but her world teems with foul and thunderous emanations from the underground. The pale victuals and tusks of saliva appear in an almost poetical way - whereas for a psychotic the same image might have suggested that "these tusks are coming out of my mouth and they tie me to my dentures". When she looks at the pictures of her son, already different from any other babies she remembers his fears about dangerous images in a wallpaper and in an etching. I was reminded of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, like in VN's, there is a merging of background and figure, a fusion of its main theme and the rest."

"How the background is perceived by an abnormal mind teaches us learn about the sick boy's visions. Contrary to what usually happens in routine life when the "figure", not the "background", is invested with meaning, in them it is the background who seems to move. This is a story of profound grief and pain, full of weeds and flowers mangled by a troglodyte farmer who introduces the monstruous darkness that shall transform tenderness into madness or crush it out altogether."

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.