Each story in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth is a masterpiece that vividly conveys a historical person's grappling with life's big questions. Each story transported me into a specific time and place. The characters are unforgettable.
Mason's background as a physician and psychiatry inform these stories, each character grappling with challenges biological or mental.
A reluctant pugilist, the product of the "cursed Gemini of Poverty and Fertility," dwells on the moral aspect of his trade. "You boys go out and think you are fighting a boxer but really you're fighting the world," a philosophical man shares.
Alfred Russel Wallace is driven to search for new species, imperiling his health, and independently developing a theory of evolution. I had read about his collection of birds in The Feather Thief by by Kirk Wallace Johnson.
An immigrant demonstrates extreme patriotism, chagrined that he was unable to join the army and die for his adopted country.
In the smoke-filled city of London, a mother desperately seeks a remedy for her son's asthma.
A doctor's temporary lapses in memory appears to be caused by an alternate and more appealing personality.
An agent of the telegraph line lives in isolation in the jungle, forming deep attachments to other agents along the line. This was one of my favorite stories.
A female aeronaute investigates a dark line in the upper atmosphere.
A mental patient is obsessed with collecting data--recording the history of the mundane--which he stitches onto cloth. The story is inspired by the art created by Bispo do Rosario. Voices instructed him to catalog all things on earth. His over 800 works of found art are now celebrated.
I had read Daniel Mason's novel The Winter Soldier and the story stayed in my head, a sure sign of a well-written novel.
Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner and A Far Country.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories
by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date May 5, 2020
ISBN 9780316477635
PRICE $27.00 (USD)
from the publisher:
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner, a collection of interlaced tales of men and women facing the mysteries and magic of the world.
On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.
At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories -- among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner -- cap a fifteen-year project.
From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."
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