Joseph Viek, Bardo99's protagonist awakens to learn there has been an accident. But what kind of accident? The massive coronary that ends his own life, or a much more dread accident, the kind we associate with places like Chernobyl? On his way to the disaster zone, a road accident strands him in a deserted tundra. Rescued by an unholy trinity of American GIs, more adventures await him: quarantine in a cancer ward -- or is it an AIDS ward? -- a resurrection of the dead from all of post-modernist 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--back cover.

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