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Title: The Stove-Junker
Author: S.K. Kalsi
Narrator: Brad Wills
Format: Unabridged
Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-04-16
Publisher: Surya K. Kalsi
Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
Part elegy, part history, part existential ghost tale, The Stove-Junker is a harrowing, lyrical meditation on loss, heartbreak, and the power of memory. In this extraordinary debut novel, S.K. Kalsi has crafted a haunting tale of unvarnished self-examination, as experienced through the story's central character, Somerset Garden, the stove-junker.
In the winter of 2012, 79-year-old Somerset travels back to his ancestral home in idyllic Drums, Pennsylvania, to renovate his dilapidated house. Burdened by the loss of his beloved wife, the long-ago disappearance of his rebellious son, and angry at God and at himself, Somerset hopes to reach a final understanding of the meaning of his life. While a blizzard barrels down from the north, Somerset discovers an unnamed boy squatting on the property, a strange child who forces him to confront his past.
As he unearths objects in the house that had been lost or discarded in the debris, Somerset remembers his father's cruelty and the accident that cost him his brother's life; he revisits the itinerant wandering of his youth, tethered to a troubled mother; he mourns the loss of his wife and ponders the decades-long absence of his son - all of whom are caught in the grip of Luzerne County's ancient history of violence.
Members Reviews:
Five Stars
I loved it! But then again it's my novel :)
Rewarding for literature lovers, challenging for others
In an excellent, depressing, and undoubtedly realistic 2012 blog post entitled " 'It Can't Be Done': The Difficulty of Growing a Jazz Audience," Kurt Ellenberger notes:
"...most of the music we are trying to build an audience for is cognitively demanding. So we're looking for some marketing, education, packaging or programming strategy that will influence and/or supersede both personal taste and the enormous pressures of the dominant popular culture; at the same time, we're asking people to commit to an art form that will tax (and probably frustrate) their capabilities before, hopefully, delivering a heightened aesthetic experience."
Most people, even most educated and intelligent people, don't want to grapple with cognitively demanding material in their leisure time. Attempts to make them want to - Oprah Winfrey's 2005 "Summer of Faulkner" is a great example - are almost always foreordained to failure. Dragging those who are not accomplished swimmers into the deep end of the pool is more likely to alarm them than stimulate or satisfy them.
I say this by way of preface to introducing a beautiful novel by a clearly gifted author - S.K. Kalsi's The Stove-Junker. As it happens, Faulkner is the first author that Kalsi acknowledges in a list of influences in the "Acknowledgements" at the back of the book, and the comparison is not an over-reach, because the commonalities are apparent:
Stream-of-consciousness writing style
Dense, poetic, highly specific prose
Unreliable narration
Thickly described place-setting (in Kalsi's case, Luzerne County in Northeast Pennsylvania)
Only a couple of inches beneath the highly figured modernist surface, you find a melodramatic, potentially pulpy story of a deeply dysfunctional family across a couple of generations, with heavy "shadows of the past"
This last point is what makes Kalsi more Faulknerian than Joycean (Joyce is the second writer he thanks).
