Product Description

From the author of Radiance, a dazzling and unhinging collection of his finest storiesIn 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3016964 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Kafkaesque? Absolutely! But also Ivesian.
First, let me thank J Scott Morrison, fellow reviewer, for bringing this collection of short stories by Carter Scholz to my attention. The title story, "The Amount to Carry," resonates with me to a degree to which he is fully aware. And, since this title story is not only one to which I can personally relate, but also the best story in an anthology of excellent stories overall, I'll save a good portion of my commentary for an in-depth discussion of this story, for the end.

Scholz's stories are both genre-bending and mind-bending. The "credits" page states that a number of them had previously been published in various science fiction magazines and anthologies. Since these are publications that I don't routinely read, Scholz arrives at my reading desk as a brand new (to me) author. And he is a fascinating writer; make no mistake about it.

One is hard-pressed to describe the type of writer that Scholz is, other than, perhaps, post-modernist experimental. No one story in this book could ever serve to pin him down; they cover too much ground for that to happen. Suffice it to say that Scholz has an imagination that runs wild. Further, it should be said that he is a tremendously gifted writer, even in those stories that do not resonate strongly with the reader.

If there is an overarching theme to his writings here - and I have my doubts about this - it is his use of irony, combined with his ability to play games with the nuances of time and the physics of the real world, in the sense of what these attributes mean in reality. (The results are often more surreal than real, needless to say.) But each story is so different from the others, and each is such a unique standalone setpiece, that it is an ill-begotten attempt on my part to categorize the uncategorizable through oversimplification.

Some stories remind one of what was so great about Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" series of tales. "Altomira," for example, places the current-day narrator, one Bernard Vogel, an art historian struggling to make his academic bones, in the time frame and world of Jan van Eyck. Vogel's labors to understand the identities and placement of two background subjects in one of Eyck's most famous paintings has a nice, but unpredictable, twist of an ending. Similarly, "Mengele's Jew" is a rather manic take-off on the famous "Schroedinger's cat" paradox. (This is the famous "gedanken" ["thought"] experiment of Erwin Schroedinger regarding whether a cat, placed inside a box with a radioactive pellet which, when it decays, will kill the cat, is at any given moment "dead or alive" in the absence of observing the cat's state directly. The paradox lies in the meaning of the terms "observation" and "measurement" as they relate to quantum physics.) Suffice it to say that Mengele, in this revisionist approach to history, is treated rather poetically in the final analysis. Those readers having some quantum physics knowledge are sure to have their own wavefunctions collapse in roars of laughter at the twist Scholz gives this "paradox."

The stories not particularly amenable to the "Twilight Zone" setting can be equally mind-stretching. In "Travels," we meet up with the spirit of Marco Polo, as the spirit's thoughts travel outward in the galaxy, carrying on a conversation with a sentient computer lodged on a small planet in orbit about a dead star. The computer's gain is Polo's loss all the while the colloquy carries on. In "The Nine Billion Names of God," Scholz places himself at the crossroads of science fiction history, having a dialog with his editor over whether or not his retelling of the famous Asimov story is "original" work.

Scholz has chosen to save the best until last, as have I: the title story, "The Amount to Carry." This is as fine a flight of fancy as I think I've ever read, and the extent to which it resonated with me is incalculable. I can only consider Scholz as a "kindred spirit" in the matter of Charles Ives for having both the imagination and the knowledge of biographical detail that makes the story "work" for me the way it does.

The story finds Ives, Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens in Berlin in 1921, for a convention of insurance executives. It is a matter of fact that all three - composer, writer and poet - "put food on the table" by working in the insurance industry. (In point of fact, Ives became very wealthy in his day job as insurance executive, and his pamphlet "The Amount to Carry" was the origin of what we call "estate planning," using whole life insurance as the means for building annuities.)

But this insurance convention is merely a plot device for Scholz to take an ultimate flight of fancy into the realm of sheer conjecture regarding Ives's fortunes as a composer during his active composing life. Kafka is there for the purpose of bringing to Ives's attention the Munich performance, ten years earlier, of Ives's Third Symphony, conducted by Gustav Mahler. (Stevens's role in the story is less essential, but nonetheless wry in its own way.)

Only someone deeply interested in the full story of this particular "twist of fate" would have the audacity to fold it into a story. And only one with an intimate knowledge of all the facts - about both Ives and the Mahler connection, and about Ives's personal life - could fold into the story such a wealth (and warmth) of detail that Scholz has. (There are only one or two very minor solecisms. Given Scholz's research, even this small number comes as a mild surprise.) The story succeeds on every level, and leaves me with the thought that Scholz and I somehow inhabit parallel universes. Or perhaps the same universe, save for the fact that we have yet to meet.

Carter Scholz, call home. I'll be glad to take your call.