A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

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."

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason

I am thrilled that I stopped resisting The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason. I was leery of delving into another WWI novel, knowing the despair and suffering I would encounter. When I began reading I couldn't stop and stayed up late to finish it.

The novel tells the story of Lucius Krzelewski of Vienna, an inexperienced young medical student who shows much promise but is frustrated by the limitations of medical school. When war breaks out, a friend convinces Lucius that he can get first-hand experience by enlisting as an army doctor.

Lucius is sent to a remote hospital on the Eastern Front. The doctors abandoned the hospital when typhus broke out. In charge is a nurse, a nun named Sister Margarete and under her tutelage, Lucius learns how to doctor and how to love.

Lucius knows his job is to patch the men up so they can be returned to the war. He wants to protect the men in his care whose wounds are unseen but who the army deems fit for service. One soldier particularly affects Lucius and Margarete, a beautiful artist who arrives in winter, so traumatized he cannot stop screaming.

The storyline and characters kept my interest but I also appreciated how I learned so much about the war on the Eastern Front, the level of medical practice and knowledge at the time, and the shifting political landscape of Eastern Europe.

I have read so many terrific WWI novels in the past few years. So much has changed in 100 years. And yet, so much remains the same.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Winter Soldier
by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown & Co.
Publication: September 2018
ISBN: 9780316477604
PRICE: $28.00 (USD)

Read an excerpt here. See photos relating to the novel here.

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I did not expect to find a link between the story and my family genealogical research.

One day when Margarete is away longer than Lucius thinks reasonable he goes searching for her, becoming lost and stumbling into the front. He flees and finds himself far from the hospital.

The names of the cities Lucius passes through were familiar, and then Lucius arrives at Stanislau.

The city appears in the records under many names: first Stanisławów to honor Stanisław Rewera Potocki, then changed to Stanislau, Stanislaviv, and Stanislav, and finally, in 1962 it became Ivano-Frankivsk.

It was the city where my husband's great-parents, Christoph and Carolina, were married. I found their marriage in the Odessa Files. Carolina Reinke has family roots in Stansislawka back to her great-grandfather.

So the novel not only educated me in a general way but also shed light on the landscape of my husband's ancestors and gratitude that the family left the area before WWI.