Thought-provoking collection of mostly linked stories. All concern Haitians, mainly immigrants to USA, with much time also spent in Haiti itself under the Duvaliers. There is a slightly remote feeling to many of the stories, as if the tellers are in a state of inculcated shock, yet beneath is an explosive history of suffering, courage, rage, and tender humanity. I did want more--not more stories, but more insight into certain characters, more access to their emotions at times. There are moments when these good stories rise to excellence. Very worthwhile read; a telling story of the circumstances faced by so many Haitian people. ( )

In Haiti during the dictatorial 1960s, the man known as the "dew breaker" was a torturer. Now an American and a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, he maintains a quiet life as a husband and father; as we meet his family, neighbors, and even his victims, his story becomes one of reconciliation and rebellion; as we return one more time to his turbulent past, we witness his last violent act, and his first encounter with the woman who offers him a chance for salvation: Great book until the end - I thought it just sort of dropped off. ( )

Absolutely loved this book. It's about a family of Haitian immigrants living in New York. The father worked as a prison guard in Haiti and is the eponymous Dew Breaker of the novel. The book consists of interrelated stories, and slowly the daughter of the dew breaker discovers how her parents met, and why her father is called a dew breaker. I'd read one of the chapters - the one where the mother and father meet again after a separation of seven years in New Yorker or the Atlantic or similar such magazine. The story just stayed with me, even though I forgot the author's name. When I read this book and found that chapter in it, I was so thrilled. It was like greeting a long forgotten friend.

A colleague of mine and I were discussing this book and she said "this woman can write her ass off". I can't think of a more apt thing to say. There is such an underlying richness to the book. Very highly recommended. ( )

A nicely written, interesting read. The only thing that really bothered me about the book was that I thought the stories would be slightly more connected or have slightly more of an effect on each other than they did. As I started reading I found each interesting, but thought they felt a little lose. I brushed it off assuming the book might come back to them or that aspects of other stories would somehow relate to them in a way that would tighten up threads in previous stories, but ended up a little disappointed. In the end it wasn't quite as affecting as I had been expecting. Still, a sometimes haunting book that asks some interesting questions and doesn't try to give easy answers. ( )

My first time reading this author who tells a very ood story. ( )

Confusing ( )

Story of Haiti immigrants to NY who lived through the brutal Duvalier era. About a father's past as a guard and a killer for the government and the night he is redeemed. His last kill brings him to his future wife. Each chapter loosely weaves the people he touched as a killer. An interesting hybrid short story/novel mix. ( )

a little confusing, not as impacting as her first book ( )

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn...

Haitian lives, Haitian scars

BOOK INFORMATION
The Dew Breaker
Our Rating A
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 242 pages
Genre: Fiction
Price: $22
By Jenny Shank, Special To The News
March 12, 2004

Despite her youth, Edwidge Danticat has always written with the gravity and insight of a wise old seer. Still, she could not have foreseen that civil unrest would break out in her native Haiti again, just before the publication of her new novel, The Dew Breaker, making the timeliness of its subject matter acute.

The Dew Breaker examines the violence, corruption, and political instability of an earlier period in Haitian history. Although much of the book is set in present New York City, the narrative of The Dew Breaker spirals around the events of the 1960s and '70s in Haiti when the dictator Francois Duvalier sustained a personal police force to torture his adversaries, called "dew breakers" because they came to claim their victims in the early morning hours when dew still beaded the vegetation.

This description of its setting makes The Dew Breaker sound as though it is a political polemic veiled as fiction, but this is not the case. Danticat's rare gift is her ability to set her novels and stories amid fraught times in which the actions of the government cause upheaval in the lives of regular people, without ever once losing focus on her characters. She leaves the preaching to the preachers, such as the dynamic minister who figures in the denouement of The Dew Breaker.

This book, like her others, never wavers in placing its attention on individual lives, and as she moves from one character to another you feel she is holding their faces up to you, each of them locking the reader with a gaze too intense to shirk.

The face at the center of The Dew Breaker bears a terrible mark, which Ka Bienaimé describes as the "blunt, ropelike scar that runs from my father's right cheek down to the corner of his mouth." Ka, a young sculptor, grew up believing that the scar was the result of an injury her father sustained while he was unjustly imprisoned in Haiti.

When Ka creates an idealistic mahogany sculpture of her father, he destroys it and finally admits that he "was the hunter, he was not the prey," someone unworthy of a sculpture. He had been working as a torturer in a prison in the 1960s, and the scar was the result of an attack by his final victim.

The rest of the novel unfolds in chapter-long snapshots of the lives of people who this dew breaker affected. Many of them have immigrated to New York; some of them are haunted by the illusion that they see their former torturer everywhere they go, and some actually see him.

One such victim is Michel, whose parents were killed by the dew breaker when he was a young boy. His aunt Estina raised him in rural Haiti and he later moved to New York. When he is a young man, he recognizes the barber from whom he rents an apartment as being the man who killed his parents, and he goes on a pilgrimage to visit Estina in her village and ask what he should do about this.

Danticat's descriptions of this visit are frequently lovely: "His aunt was leaning forward with both hands holding up her face, her white hair braided like a crown of gardenias around her head."

Estina dies before Michel can extract from her the crucial answer to his question, and he is left, like the other characters in this book, to ponder alone the implications of what was done in the past for what must be done in the present. The portrait of Michel, like those of others in The Dew Breaker suggests that everyone's experience of pain is so individual that each person must come to his own conclusion about how to best lead his life in its wake.

Although The Dew Breaker is a somber book, it is not without hope. The characters in it may never be able to shake their memories from their terrible experiences, but they all have been resilient enough to craft new lives for themselves that bear little resemblance to the old ones.

This is a survivors' tale. As Danticat writes about the dew breaker's wife, she lives daily with full knowledge of her husband's past but cannot dwell on it because "She was too busy concentrating on and revising who she was now, or who she wanted to become."

It is easy to see from this accomplished novel that as long as the people of Haiti are cursed to live in interesting times, Edwidge Danticat will be there to bear witness.

Jenny Shank's short stories have appeared in CutBank, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other magazines, and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. ( )

Absolutely recommended! Don't be put off by the structure of this book -- I think it's done very well... the first and last of the short stories provide a cover for the stories in between the two; you don't have to work really hard to make connections among the stories. The story of the dew breaker is found in interconnecting threads among these stories, and gives you maybe just a little glimpse (because, frankly, unless you lived it, I don't think anyone could fully understand the turmoil and upheavals in Haiti's history) of what people had to go through under the reign of one of Haiti's worst dictators in its history, and the people caught up in having some little semblance of power under his regime.

On page 117, the author notes of one of the characters, "Aline had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives." This is true not only of the victims of the Macoutes (the militia that formed under the new dictatorship of Duvalier after his father), but of those who, like the main character of this novel, were a part of the regime's killing/torture machine and later lived to face their own kind of torture having to relive what they did. So in a sense, you might argue that these people did have face their own brand of justice: alienation from other Haitians in their new homes after they fled, having to hide their identities from everyone, including family members, from fear that they might be found out.

Haiti and its history has long held a fascination for me, and this book adds a little to my understanding of this country which seems to have always been in a state of upheaval. I highly recommend this book, and I have three others by this author sitting on my shelves waiting to be read. ( )

This is a novel of interconnected lives that do not always come together, but all of which turn around the horrors and the personal effects of the Papa Doc and Baby Doc regimes of terror and torture in Haiti. The novel begins with a Haitian father (a barber) and daughter (born in the US), living in the US and travelling to deliver a sculpture the daughter has done of her father who has lived in the US for 30 years as, the daughter thinks, an escapee from torture in a Haitian prison. The father destroys the sculpture, which depicts a man in torment, because, he confesses, he was not a prisoner, but in fact the torturer himself. It is only at the end of the book that these threads are pulled together to explain how the man and his wife met in Haiti and fled to the US to begin a new life, but one always lived on the edge of fear that someone would recognize and denounce him.

In fact, the barber is recognized, by one of the three boarders that he and wife have in their basement to supplement their meagre income. The boarder, now a young man, saw the barber shoot his parents after setting fire to their home to force them outside. He sneaks in on the barber one time, when the wife is away, and stands over him while he sleeps, but,

Looking down at the barber's face, which had shrunk so much over the years, he lost the desire to kill. It wasn't that he was afraid, for he was momentarily feeling bold and fearless. It wasn't pity, either. He was too angry to feel pity. It was something else, something less measurable. It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why–why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.

These are exactly the sort of human considerations that those perpetrating arbitrary violence never contemplate, or do not allow themselves to contemplate, in their work. The author is hopeful that there can be an end to the cycles of violence, and in fact this young man's decision echoes that of the barber when he realized that he was through with his previous life and could simply not return to it.

This is a novel about dislocations: physical, which is the result of circumstances, and emotional which I think the author sees as intrinsic to life. There is the physical dislocation from home with a large number of people in exile, dreaming of the chance to return, or going back to fight against the regime and perhaps die in the attempt. Emotional dislocations occur on various levels: the cold distancing of a torturer/police thug who treats fellow human beings as less than vermin; the distancing of a dictator and his cronies interested only in their own pleasures and comforts and happy to sacrifice any number of people to protect them; dislocation from loved ones who do not, and cannot, know everything that the other is thinking, or doing; and dislocation from family members. It is about compromises and even about the redemption and forgiveness that is possible. But the dislocations remain: the daughter of the barber, who has been deceived all her life, asks her mother how she could possibly love this man, and there is no answer in the phone conversation which the daughter breaks off. We never know whether the daughter is reconciled with her father.

I enjoyed this book, and Danticat's writing style which is clean, simple, declarative.