A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories by Daniel Mason
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I so wanted to love Mason’s novel The Winter Solder, and I did love important aspects of it. So it was a joyous relief to fall hard for this collection of short stories. I was hooked from the first page of the first story, “Death of the Pugilist,” with its biblical structure and incantatory language that lights up a world of brutality, blood, and death and the literal fall of a man. From there to an almost hallucinatory wander with one of my heroes, Alfred Russel Wallace. There is a poignant tale of one immigrant seeking rest in Civil War re-enactments, and a dazzling tribute to Poe as a series of absence seizures becomes a superior sort of double nibbling away at the ordinary life of a 19th-century doctor. Mason, a psychiatrist by profession, delves into the myriad ways people see and experience the world, from a solitary telegraph operator deep in the Brazilian jungle to a woman seeking the rent in the fabric of the universe, to a man existing almost entirely in his own thoughts, visions, and drives. Some stories work better than others, as is to be expected, but every page is worth it.
There is definitely a 19th-century feel to most of the stories, both in setting and in style. As a deep-dyed lover of Victorian literature, I swim easily in it. And yet, it’s rarely florid or difficult – the language is precise, rich, measured. Thanks, Dr. Mason. This book gave me joy.
View all my reviews