A Registry Of My Passage Upon The Earth by Daniel Mason

 

This is an anthology of various stories by Daniel Mason.  There are nine stories in the collection.  Each concerns some individual and their lives.  The title story, which is the last in the collection, concerns the life and artistic work of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, who lived in Brazil, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent fifty years in an institution, where he embroidered lists of all he encountered in spectacular works of art.

Other stories portray a boxer and the scientific collector Alfred Russel Wallace who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and extended his work.  A Civil War reenactor is the protagonist of a story as is the Egyptian Psammetichus I.  A young boy sick with tuberculosis in Victorian England is portrayed as is a woman hot air balloonist and an agent in the jungle who spends his life alone.  My favorite story is one called The Second Doctor Service.  It portrays a middle aged doctor who starts to have periods where he is absent from his body such as found in petit mal epilepsy.  He starts to realize that while he is absent he is interacting with others with a different personality and as time goes on, he begins to realize that everyone else, including his wife, prefers the other personality.

Daniel Mason is a physician who has written several novels that were acclaimed such as The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.  He is currently  a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University.  The stories are immediately engaging and his ability to pinpoint personality traits is enticing.  I felt several of the stories had a weaker ending than I expected.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.