Pineda, Cecile, Pineda
Description
Joseph Viek, Bardo99's protagonist, awakens from a plunging sleep to learn there has been an accident. The massive coronary that ends his own life? Or
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a much more dreaded accident, the kind we have come to associate with places like Chernobyl, Kyshtym, or Hanford, Washington? He boards a Land Rover to reach the disaster zone, but a road accident leaves him stranded in a deserted tundra that resembles the Nevada wasteland. Rescued by an unholy trinity of American G.I.s, he spends the night in the hotel from hell. But more adventures are waiting for him: quarantine in a cancer ward, or is it an AIDS ward? A resurrection of the dead from all of post-modernism's post-military catastrophes: My Lai, Babi Yar, Kigali, and 'no-gun' Ri. And why is it that everything he touches seems to have the uncanny misfortune of blowing up? Cecile Pineda has crafted a divine comedy where the sacred keeps uneasy truce with the profane.
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