The Amount to Carry: Stories

by Carter Scholz

Book Overview

In this collection of twelve stories, Carter Scholz reveals his truly remarkable range and prodigious narrative gifts. Traveling from the surface of the moon to the New Jersey suburbs, they explore... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312269013
• ISBN13: 9780312269012
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Postmodern parables

This book is an anthology of twelve short pieces by science fiction author, Carter Scholz. These stories present quite an intellectual challenge to the reader. First, Carter Scholz has a large, varied and often specialized vocabulary. While reading this book, I repeatedly found myself making a list of unusual or foreign words and phrases which I needed to look up. In addition, many of the stories are inspired by or based upon other works of fiction, science, poetry and art. I found myself looking up references and allusions. For example, Mengele's Jew is based upon Erwin Schroedinger's famous paradigm. A Draft of Canto CI is a fractured poem with prose sections between each fragment. The poem comes together in the end. It is far more beautiful and meaningful than the Ezra Pound poem from which it borrows its title. Altamira, which is inspired by works of art as diverse as the Paleolithic cave paintings and the Flemish old masters, is the most contemplative and imaginative time-travel story that I've had the good fortune to read. In it, a contemporary art historian breathes a prayer to understand art, and then finds himself in Holland in 1430. It was impossible to remain unmoved as the historian seizes the opportunity and struggles to make his wish come true. The title story is an imaginary meeting between Franz Kafka, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives at the 1929 Conference of International Insurance Executives. To fully comprehend the beauty of this masterful story, the reader needs some knowledge of the lives and works of the two authors and the composer, all of whom kept their day jobs in the insurance industry. When reading this story, I felt as if I had stepped into Kafka's shoes and was wandering the hotel in his place. (I note that another reviewer had much the same experience with the story except in the shoes of Ives). Reading this story was, for me, an almost uncanny experience. The Eve of the Last Apollo, concerns the first man to set foot on the moon and how the experience transforms him. He cannot, metaphorically speaking, return to life on earth, but has instead become The Man on the Moon. Through Scholz's writing, the man's loneliness, displacement and despair are palpable to the reader. A Catastrophe Machine concerns a young philosopher who is struggling to develop a mathematical model of loss. His life imitates his art to the point where he becomes the machine that he has worked to perfect and his life becomes an atrocity. There are a six more stories in this collection, each of which is an impressive work of post-modern fiction. These stories are well worth the effort it takes to understand them. I highly recommend this book.