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The Amount to Carry: Stories
From the author of Radiance, a dazzling and unhinging collection of his finest stories
In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz, author of the critically acclaimed novel Radiance and co-author (with Jonathan Lethem) of Kafka Americana , reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, from Jan Van Eyck’s “invention” of oil painting to the aged Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, from Galileo’s telescope to a theory of catastrophes, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. In the same manner as the later works of Nabokov or the fictive universes of Calvino, Kafka, and Borges, Scholz’s stories disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, The Amount to Carry brings us bravura performances of the imagination.
In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz, author of the critically acclaimed novel Radiance and co-author (with Jonathan Lethem) of Kafka Americana , reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, from Jan Van Eyck’s “invention” of oil painting to the aged Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, from Galileo’s telescope to a theory of catastrophes, they explore the places in the human mind where science and fiction merge. In the same manner as the later works of Nabokov or the fictive universes of Calvino, Kafka, and Borges, Scholz’s stories disturb the universe, probe the worlds we call home, and measure the degrees of our alienation. Mind-expanding, entertaining, and often richly disquieting, The Amount to Carry brings us bravura performances of the imagination.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2003
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About the author
Carter Scholz
53 books9 followersCarter Scholz (né Robert Carter Scholz) is a speculative fiction author and composer of music.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 5, 2019
This is a story collection from 2003 that contains 20- and 30-year-old stories, but they don't really read as dated. The first one is the closest, an alternative story about the first man on the moon, five years later (and written in 1976).
These are not so much 'science' fiction stories as 'alternative' fiction stories: An art teacher goes back in time to the Holland of Jan van Eyck, and finds unexpected things about the art of the time and about prehistoric art. Franz Kafka works for an insurance company (which was true) and encounters a variety of interesting people in 1920s Prague. A young mathematician specializes in catastrophe theory and is subsumed by the military-industrial complex.
Scholz takes real people or real events and twists them in fantastical ways to develop thoughtful, interesting stories. I am not sure I understood the meaning of all the stories, but the ones I cited above were rewarding. The bonus story was an epistolary story told with letters between a science fiction writer and an editor, where the writer submitted a word-for-word version of Arthur Clarke's story “The Nine Billion Names of God” and claimed that he revised it into a completely different story. Shades of Borges! (which is acknowledged by the editor, and dismissed by the author, who claims not to have read Borges.) Very funny.
These are not so much 'science' fiction stories as 'alternative' fiction stories: An art teacher goes back in time to the Holland of Jan van Eyck, and finds unexpected things about the art of the time and about prehistoric art. Franz Kafka works for an insurance company (which was true) and encounters a variety of interesting people in 1920s Prague. A young mathematician specializes in catastrophe theory and is subsumed by the military-industrial complex.
Scholz takes real people or real events and twists them in fantastical ways to develop thoughtful, interesting stories. I am not sure I understood the meaning of all the stories, but the ones I cited above were rewarding. The bonus story was an epistolary story told with letters between a science fiction writer and an editor, where the writer submitted a word-for-word version of Arthur Clarke's story “The Nine Billion Names of God” and claimed that he revised it into a completely different story. Shades of Borges! (which is acknowledged by the editor, and dismissed by the author, who claims not to have read Borges.) Very funny.
December 31, 2016
Some of these stories are pretty rarified, but the last, the title story is wonderful. It concerns three insurance execs, all with an artistic bent, who meet at a Prague conference after the First World War...
March 14, 2022
Scholz is too clever for me...
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September 4, 2012Here's a taste:
An ex-astronaut whose marriage is falling apart contemplates the end of NASA's manned missions, ending a conversation with his son and the story with "I don't know, son. I don't know." A researcher interested in a mystery in a Van Eyck oil painting falls through time, apprentices himself to Van Eyck, and becomes the mystery of the Van Eyck painting he was researching. A giant satellite-computer has a conversation with a passing electrical pattern that identifies itself as Marco Polo. A hidden Mengele contemplates Schrodinger's cat by imagining a Holocaust that might or might not have happened. Writer and insurance agent Franz Kafka, poet and insurance agent Wallace Stevens, and composer and insurance agent Charles Ives walk into a hotel, and the first one says...
That last story is the one the collection is named after, and though it has the structure of a joke (a Harvard man, a Yale man, and a Jew walk into a bar...), it's not very funny, which is pretty emblematic of the stories here. If there's one theme here it's entropy,from the slow falling apart of a marriage or a man's sanity to the catastrophes of history: earthquake, snow storm, Holocaust. I would say that fans of Kelly Link might like Cart Scholz's slip-streamy ways, but the real root here is Borges: you can't throw a rock in here without hitting libraries of Babel, endless hallways, word-for-word re-creations of other stories. Even when Scholz goes for humor, in the story of an ex-science fiction writer who finds redemption in writing, his prose is dense, allusive, and beautifully forbidding.
That's either me selling the book or warning you away from it--your choice.
An ex-astronaut whose marriage is falling apart contemplates the end of NASA's manned missions, ending a conversation with his son and the story with "I don't know, son. I don't know." A researcher interested in a mystery in a Van Eyck oil painting falls through time, apprentices himself to Van Eyck, and becomes the mystery of the Van Eyck painting he was researching. A giant satellite-computer has a conversation with a passing electrical pattern that identifies itself as Marco Polo. A hidden Mengele contemplates Schrodinger's cat by imagining a Holocaust that might or might not have happened. Writer and insurance agent Franz Kafka, poet and insurance agent Wallace Stevens, and composer and insurance agent Charles Ives walk into a hotel, and the first one says...
That last story is the one the collection is named after, and though it has the structure of a joke (a Harvard man, a Yale man, and a Jew walk into a bar...), it's not very funny, which is pretty emblematic of the stories here. If there's one theme here it's entropy,from the slow falling apart of a marriage or a man's sanity to the catastrophes of history: earthquake, snow storm, Holocaust. I would say that fans of Kelly Link might like Cart Scholz's slip-streamy ways, but the real root here is Borges: you can't throw a rock in here without hitting libraries of Babel, endless hallways, word-for-word re-creations of other stories. Even when Scholz goes for humor, in the story of an ex-science fiction writer who finds redemption in writing, his prose is dense, allusive, and beautifully forbidding.
That's either me selling the book or warning you away from it--your choice.
September 13, 2012
a very mixed collection from scholz, who i new only from his novel radiance and cannot remember from where i learned of that. in this book he presents 12 stories, though i'm inclined to call them 'efforts' because some are less stories and instead pastiche, experiment, bagatelle. one story imagines an encounter between kafka, wallace stevens, and charles ives early in the 20th century as their un-extraordinary daily lives casually intersect. another, quite disappointing story revisites italo calvino's invisible cities, this time as an encounter between the traveler polo and an enormous space-bound computer cribbed from doctor who or possibly hitchhiker's guide. an alternative future for neil armstrong leads off the collection, and josef mengele puts in an appearance elsewhere. one effort features scholz himself attempting to sell a famous science fiction story as his own rethinking of same in a tribute/parody/resetting of borges.
i feel like most of the works in the collection came from interesting ideas. unfortunately they didn't all end up interesting stories. my favorite weren't so tangled up in references, or at least not obvious references - the catastophe engine in particular.
i feel like most of the works in the collection came from interesting ideas. unfortunately they didn't all end up interesting stories. my favorite weren't so tangled up in references, or at least not obvious references - the catastophe engine in particular.
March 12, 2015
This is a wonderful collection of short stories. From "The Eve of the Last Apollo" to "The Amount to Carry," these are tales of triumphs that are as personal as a son coming to terms with his father's flaws through his own, and selfish yet, you cannot stop reading them.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews