Sunday Short: Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov

As a baby, he looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album. She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. The boy, aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player. The boy again, aged about eight, already hard to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book, which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree.

I read Vladimir Nabokov for the first time earlier in the year in the form of Lolita, and since have been on a little bit of a kick. His ability to twist your empathy into sympathy for characters that don't always deserve it is on the best side of brilliant. That said, the people in Symbols and Signs certainly do. In so few words, Symbols and Signs isn't so much a deconstruction of mental illness but a study in helplessness. The story depicts the elderly parents of an unwell son, and it's the middle of the story, with the mother sitting down with old photos and realising signs that she'd ignored as a younger woman, where this story surges into something masterful and achingly painful. Nabokov perfectly captures that feeling of being a bystander to incidents concerning loved ones, and that horrible helplessness that accompanies it. It's pretty wonderful.

You can read Symbols and Signs over at 'The New Yorker' archives.