The Stove-Junker, by S.K. Kalsi
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The Stove-Junker, by S.K. Kalsi
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Part elegy, part history, part existential ghost tale, this extraordinary debut novel is a harrowing, lyrical meditation on loss, heartbreak, and the power of memory. 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 and “Armageddon” draws near, 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 among 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.
The Stove-Junker, by S.K. Kalsi- Amazon Sales Rank: #889810 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-05-31
- Released on: 2015-05-31
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
- "The Stove-Junker is an exquisitely rendered tale of loss, bitterness, redemption, and love. S.K. Kalsi's writing is at once urgent and measured, lyrical and raw, biting and achingly tender. He is truly a master storyteller . . . Read it, and don't forget to breathe."--Dana Lise Shavin, author of The Body Tourist
From the Author Dear Good Reader, The Stove-Junker began as an exploration of loss and what losing yourself and those you love does to a soul. While exploring the meaning of loss, I discovered that the greatest thief of ourselves is Time. I remember seeing a painting at El Prado Museum in Spain twenty years ago, a famous painting by William Blake of Saturn (the Roman god of Time) devouring his children. I recall feeing horrified, yet strangely drawn to the violent image: Saturn's expression of rapaciousness and lust never left me, for it pointed to the basic truth of our existence: Self and selves cannot escape the abyss of time. The second theme of this book is identity. Our identity (who we are) remains always in doubt as time alters us and we age and falter. The people we become in old age are not the wild teenagers of a distant past, nor the toddlers of yesterday, nor the infants of an age that does not remember us. Time and identity are connected. The third interrelated theme is Memory. How we remember, what we remember, do we remember? are all ideas I explore in The Stove-Junker. Even Somerset Garden, my anti-protagonist says in the novel, "Maybe we invent what we remember," or something like that, leaving the truths of our past selves always in doubt. So as you read this book, I hope you look for ways I test and retest these ideas. By no means have I said the last word on the subject, nor set out to write a philosophical treatise on these themes, but treated them like any artist would, with patience and delicate care, and with rich detail that I hope convinces one of the importance of this character's life. Thank You For Reading, S.K. Kalsi
About the Author A "maximalist" writer, influenced by poets and musicians and philosophers, S.K. Kalsi crafts stories and sentences that resonate with depth and power. In searing prose, he reveals the souls of loners and atheists, iconoclasts and dreamers, people turned inward by obsession, crippled by heartbreak, and who find redemption through acceptance of blind fate. S.K. Kalsi holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco, a BFA in creative writing from Long Beach State, and a diploma in screenwriting from UCLA. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Glint Literary Journal, The Criterion, among others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in northern California.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Rewarding for literature lovers, challenging for others By Patrick Murtha 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 styleDense, poetic, highly specific proseUnreliable narrationThickly 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). Joyce is NOT melodramatic; he does a deep dive into ordinary clear water. Faulkner and Kalsi leap, too, but into a muck of sin and unresolved goop. That is a big difference.The specificity of the prose is worth pondering. Let me choose a Kalsi passage that is very detailed without being difficult:"Everything can kill you. The elements, wind, water, sun, cold, heat, everything is dangerous, coiled to strike your heart. I entered the medicine aisle, surrounded by shelves of fever-reducing pills and cough syrups, diabetic foot creams and salves for insect bites, joint braces for sprained wrists and ankles, and wraps for bruised knees. They had every remedy, for everything from chronic flatulence to dry eyes, sleeplessness to foot odor, gum disease to earwax, but what about loss? Maybe St. John's Wort, maybe Stinging Nettle, maybe a cocktail of B-complex vitamins and fish oils? They offered you power bars to build muscle, testosterone pills for a lazy libido, vitamin-infused water, lotions that promised to liquefy your skin, making it buttery soft and impervious to the harmful sun. They offered ointments for psoriasis, stress packs and fiber powders to regulate your bowels. Simple solutions to complex problems."Notice how this forces you to deal with profusion in precision, at a level of attentiveness that we seldom attempt in "real life." The fact is that generalities (even cliches) are comforting and relaxing, whereas poetic precision is exhausting. It must be taken slowly (which is part of the point). It makes you think. Many people do not want to think, or to experience anything that intensely and densely. Even romantic love, which is intense by definition and should be specific (because you love this person and not that one, right?) often resolves in people's minds and emotions into vague and universal simplicities. Easier that way.The audience for a novel such as this, therefore, is self-selecting once they know of its existence; it's the ones who revel in the cognitive challenges. Others will scent trouble ahead, because the instinct for avoidance of certain materials operates in them powerfully and unerringly. Needless to say, I hope you are in the first group. But I do my job by putting the facts of the case in front of you.Plot? Characters? I'll step out one inch on this: The Stove-Junker is about a man who goes home. Or thinks he does:"...I wonder if I'm inventing my life by remembering it? Perhaps I am. Perhaps imagination is a compensation for what I cannot remember. Perhaps tale-telling to fill up the time and ease this heart is a compensation for what I cannot remember. Maybe I am imagining being home, imagining the Dutch barn, the cold air and this boy. Maybe the dog is not barking and what I think is real is just imagination?"Or perhaps there is a kinship with the movie Carnival of Souls, and at a certain point in the narrative, the protagonist Somerset Garden changes states without being ready to admit it. Clues are provided but (it will not surprise you to learn) no definite answers, because it just isn't that sort of book.I leave the exploration to you.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A beautiful cake with rich flavors of meaning but the bitter sting of despair is constant. By J. B. Garner From jbgarner58.wordpress.com:It’s no secret that most of the care packages that get put into my pantry contain sweet, life-sustaining genre fiction. Sci-fi, fantasy, romance, all that sort of thing, delights both fun and sweet. I do, however, also find a fair share of dramatic literature as well and today’s meal is served up piping hot and filled with a stream-of-conscious narrative to hopefully match the best in drama and tragedy. Does Mr. Kalsi bring the goods or did he drop the plates on the way to the table?Before we find out, let us stand up straight, hands over our hearts, and recite the Starving Review pledge:I attempt to rate every book from the perspective of a fan of the genreI attempt to make every review as spoiler-free as possible.Stove-Junker stands out immediately from the other books I’ve bitten into it during my stint here as the first (purposeful) stream-of-consciousness tale so far. This stylistic choice, where the chef serves up the meal in a way to emulate how the character’s thoughts in the book pour out, can be a polarizing one among the literary food world. Some people relish the delights of cutting through the myriad thoughts of the human mind; others are turned off by the potentially scattered and confusing narrative. Much of this hinges on the skill of the chef, whether he can craft these numerous threads of thought into an over-arching, decipherable, story.Mr. Kalsi certainly shows his writing chops by managing to do so. Though certainly embracing the spontaneity and mystery inherent in turning immediate thought into a meal, the chef here imposes a certain order to the chaos, never devolving the stream-of-consciousness narrative into a total morass of words. Making sense of the system may take a chapter or two but, once you have adapted to the unique style, the rest of the book becomes simple to read. With the devil-in-the-kitchen dealt with, let’s touch upon the high points before we get to my one main criticism of Stove-Junker.The biggest virtue here is the imagery. Images, themes, meaning flows through every bite of words, especially as the narrative barrels deeper into the past of the protagonist. These aren’t flowery words for the sake of flowery-e-ness (That there is a scientific term!) and it certainly isn’t purple prose. Everything is constructed with purpose and works towards the deeper themes of the book.That doesn’t mean that plot and character are left out here, though! There is no fear in the chef to depict our cast in the harsh light of reality, even if their actual reality is questionable at times. The main cast is starkly real and therefore imminently relatable. No flatbread here, everything has been properly baked and is well-risen. The plot itself steps a bit beyond simple dramatic character study (though that could be considered its core element) with some delicate mixes of mystery and a dash of the supernatural as well. Really, this is all almost perfect ….And you know that is a set-up for my one criticism. Stove-Junker is soul-crushingly bleak. There are certain segments that push into true horror and I don’t mean ‘running out of bread-rolls at a posh dinner party’ or even ‘serial killer stalking you’ horror. I mean the kind of horrific things you know to be real, that you know happen every day, and there is no upside. There is no justice and there is no dramatic payoff. It’s bitingly real but at the same time depressing as all hell. Now, it is pretty obvious from early on that this book is tragic (the core themes, not the writing talent!) and this can be expected, but there are so few points of light, so little contrast to the waves of sorrow, that it threatens to turn the entire thing, beautiful imagery and deep themes and brilliant characterization and all, into just one grey wasteland.This doesn’t quite come to fruition, thankfully. Stove-Junker remains, despite that, a beautifully-decorated and sharply-flavorful cake with rich swirls of meaning, but the continual bitter sting of despair never leaves your mouth. Some readers might find richness in that and, if you enjoy continual tragedy, you might add an extra start to my final verdict. Even if you don’t and enjoy a good bit of dramatic literature, you still should find the time to take a bit out of Stove-Junker, just be ready for what you’re getting into!FINAL VERDICT: **** (A beautiful cake with rich flavors of meaning but the bitter sting of despair is constant.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Five Stars By S.K. Kalsi I loved it! But then again it's my novel :)
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