Winter Soldier (Mason)

The Winter Soldier 
Daniel Mason, 2018
Little, Brown and Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316477604


Summary
Vienna, 1914.
Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital.

But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus.

The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains.

But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings.

He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1976
• Where—Palo Alto, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.D., University of California Medical School
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California

Daniel Mason is an American novelist and physician. He is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), and The Winter Soldier (2018).

Mason was raised in Palo Alto, California. He received a B.A. in biology from Harvard University and an M.D. from the UCSF School of Medicine. He spent a year studying malaria on the Thailand-Myanmar border, where much of The Piano Tuner was written. The novel later became the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name (composed by Nigel Osborne to a libretto by Amanda Holden).

Mason is currently a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University where he teaches courses in the humanities and medicine. He lives in the Bay Area with his family. (Adapted from the publishers and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2018.)

Book Reviews
Despite its serious concerns, The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures.… These pages crackle with excitement-and charging cavalries, false identities, arranged marriages, scheming industrialists and missing persons.… Within the meticulously researched and magnificently realized backdrop of European dissolution, Mason finds his few lost souls, and shepherds them toward an elusive peace. Lucius's "dream of being able to see another person's thinking" is not only the controlling metaphor of The Winter Soldier, but the work of literature more broadly. Lucius may fail, but the novel he carries is a spectacular success.
Anthony Marra - New York Times Book Review


The beauty of Mason's new novel persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of his talent.… The story that unfolds in this forsaken place is so captivating that you may feel as unable to leave it as Lucius does.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Epic.… Daniel Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel.… Lucius is an irresistible protagonist.… Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture, and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: The Winter Soldier delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era's medical knowledge and practices.… Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it.
Joan Frank - San Francisco Chronicle


As lyrical as a Viennese waltz and as delicate as crystal, Mason's riveting novel examines the human heart and the wounds of war with clear eyes and compassion.
People


What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures.… Although The Winter Soldier contains some of the most brutal moments of suffering I've encountered in fiction, they're never there just to move the story along. They allow the reader to sit very close to someone in great pain and listen to him.
Wyatt Mason - New York Times Magazine


[M]oving…. Mason’s old-fashioned novel delivers a sweeping yet intimate account of WWI, and in Lucius, the author has created an outstanding protagonist.
Publishers Weekly


[I]n 1914, Lucius, a promising medical student, enlists in the Imperial Austrian Army and ends up stranded in a typhus-ridden outpost in the Carpathian Mountains.… [L]yrical and affecting novel about the costs of war and lost love. —David Keymer, Cleveland
Library Journal


A sweeping story of love found and lost, steeped in medical details that reveal the full horrors that ill-equipped doctors and nurses faced over years of vicious trench warfare, The Winter Soldier is a vivid account of one man caught up in the epic forces of war.
Booklist


Mason's contribution to war literature involves almost no depiction of fighting but rather its aftermath, the tragically scarred soldiers, and the almost equally traumatized caregivers who sacrifice their health in providing medical help to the wounded.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins with an epigraph from a 1918 French book on neurological and psychological injuries in war. What different meanings (contemporary and otherwise) can you think of for the word "affections"? How might these different meanings relate to the plot of the book?

2. While the story mostly follows Lucius following his entry into medicine, there are frequent flashbacks to childhood. Which important moments in Lucius’ childhood can you identify? How do they shape the person he becomes and the decisions that he makes?

3. Consider Lucius across the duration of the book. How do you see him changing during this period? How is he a different person when the book ends?

4. What might you say about Lucius’ friendships? What are they based on? Does this change as he gets older?

5. A number of images repeat themselves throughout the book. What is the role that they play, either in representing something from Lucius’ life, or the larger movements of history? You may wish to consider:

a. The Grottenolm (p 7, p 123). What aspects of this little creature recapitulate themes of the book (for example, you may wish to think about translucency, blindness, its association with childhood and innocence)
b. The myth of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth (p 222, p 287)
c. The Uzhok meteorite (p 37, p 216)
d. The mermaid (p 20, p 252)
e. Hidden parents (p 9, p 82) f.X-rays (p. 16 and onwards)

6. This is a book of wounds, from the physical to the mental. Considering the different wounded characters, what do you think is the role of visibility and invisibility? How do characters’ wounds shape not only their experiences, but their understanding of themselves?

7. The inset to the book depicts a winged hussar from an early 17th century illustration. While the events of the novel take place in World War 1, much of Lucius’ conception of war comes from his father romantic tales of chivalry. How do you think such stories shaped Lucius and the decisions he makes?

8. What are the different roles that medicine plays in Lucius’ life? How does his relationship to medicine and patients change over time? How is this revealed, for example, by his interactions with the old Italian man with a brain tumor (p 13), Margarete’s illness (p 152), or patients’ families (p 225)?

9. Who do you think is the "the winter soldier" of the title?

10. What role does love play in the story? Do feel that the ending represents an embrace, a transformation, or a relinquishing of love?

11. Towards the end of the novel, we read "But what he was seeking was forgiveness and atonement, and he couldn’t think of any worthy offering to give." What role do themes of atonement and forgiveness play in the novel? Do you agree with Lucius at this point, does he have a "worthy offering" to give?

12. Primum non nocere (First, do no harm) is a fundamental principal of medicine, at one point (p 229), Lucius refers to his fateful decision as "his crime." Do you agree? What, in the context of the novel, does it mean to "do no harm"?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)

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