Like Dr. Seb, the protagonist in David Kos’s remarkable novel A Measure of Undoing, Kos has taken on the task of refusing to allow us to forget the hellish aftermath of the Vietnam war.
Whether he tours us through the pungent, steaming, exotic bustle of a Vietnam city or through the ancient, sacred, war-torn countryside, or, most poignantly, through the hospital wards where lie the seemingly endless suffering and deformed children spawned by the millions of gallons of genocidal Agent Orange dropped by the American air force, or shredded by dormant cluster-bombs while innocently at play, we are inexorably led deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the satanic, U.S. war machine, and, vicariously, left as stunned as after watching Schindler’s List.
These atrocities were not, are not, supposed to repeat themselves; we were, are, supposed to learn from the bloody writing on the wall, but because that pernicious couple, greed and privilege, would prefer to pretend the past is over and to party on, Kos utilizes his eloquent writing skills to do more than entertain us with snapshots of gilded pagodas; instead, he weaves suspenseful and sensuous intrigues with strands of well- researched barbed wire and gradually draws us into a plot as devious and dark as the lies and deceptions that the American government has used to mislead its voters throughout the recent decades.
Kos is clearly captured by the rich history of these heroic people and easily paints colorful murals of their exhausting daily existence, but because he respectfully admires their struggle, he will not allow us to remain merely traveling voyeurs, as the American couple, the Samuelsons, attempt to be. He will lift the veil and read out the charges again and again, illustrating that these wars on foreign soil are not America’s wars; they are its business. And Seb, the ex-patriot doctor who chooses to remain in Vietnam long after his tour of duty has ended, defies the gods on Olympus by attempting to symbolically re-balance the outrageous inequities that are still being swept under the (collective) table of our blithe western world.
Seb upends the apparently impossible tables of history when he takes hostage a corporate mogul (Samuelson) come to Vietnam under the guise of job creation, but, of course, to in fact again make an obscene profit on the broken backs of the peasants. Seb’s final sacrifice is an attempt to transcend the daily band-aid therapy he is forced (through systematic lack of funding) to administer, by tying down the fading glory of the American’s dream onto the Procrustean bed until he comes to his senses, and Seb will not be satisfied until he also forces open the eyes of Samuelson’s soul in an attempt to awaken a moral conscience as well.
This is no small task, and because literature is not politics, Kos, like Seb, also takes a necessary risk in straddling the two disciplines: slowly and steadily as a surgeon, Kos presses his fiery manifesto into the eye of the Cyclops, leaving the reader with the small but flickering flame of hope that perhaps we, too, can still make some contribution to the
reparations necessary in the restoration of humanitarian balance on this endangered planet.
http://www.scrollinspace.com/article.php?story=20060924121357995