Customer Reviews

The Dew Breaker (Today Show Book Club #23)

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
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This young Haitian-American writer is making quite a name for herself. In this, her fourth novel, she again displays her depth of understanding of her people. She writes clear, sharp, poignant sentences that go straight to the heart. And the story, itself, is chilling.

The book is episodic and can be looked at a series of short stories. But they're all interrelated, and tell the story of Haiti over the past twenty years. A "dew breaker" is a prison guard who tortures the captives in his charge. And he is the central character in the book. He now lives in Brooklyn and has a loving wife and a grown up daughter. He now works as a barber and his past seems a long time ago. We see him through his daughter's eyes as he reveals his true past to her. The daughter loves her father but this new fact about his life is hard to accept.

We also meet other Haitian people, living in America. There's the nurse who sends most of her paycheck home to her mother. There's the young man who brings his wife to this country. There's another man who travels back to Haiti to visit his dying aunt. There are three Haitian women learning English and sharing their stories with each other.

Eventually, we flash back to the story of the "dew breaker" in Haiti. It's not a pleasant story but yet a very human one. Even though we don't forgive, we do understand.

I was a little reluctant to read this book. I thought it would have detailed horrors and be excessively brutal. I was glad that Ms. Danticant, in her wisdom, spent most of her time on character development and story. She only put in a few of the horrible details, mostly focusing on the people, rather than on the gore.

The book is only 242 pages long, a fast read. It left me with a deep understanding of Haiti, its people, and what is going on in the news today.

Author Danticat introduces her story of Haitian immigrants and the lives they have escaped in Haiti with the story of Ka, a young sculptress whose parents think of her as a "good angel," her name also associated symbolically with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ka is in Florida with her father to deliver a powerfully rendered sculpture to a Haitian TV actress. Ka's father, who served as the model for the sculpture, however, destroys it, confessing tearfully that he is not the man his daughter has always believed him to be, and admitting that the disfiguring scar on his face was not the result of torture in a Haitian prison. He was "the hunter," he says, and "not the prey," one of the "dew breakers," or torturers, who as part of the Tonton Macoutes, committed political assassinations and inflicted unimaginable tortures on orders of dictators Francois Duvalier and his son "Baby Doc" between 1957-86.

In a series of episodes which resemble short stories more than a novel in form, Danticat illuminates the lives of approximately a dozen Haitian immigrants as they remember this traumatic period "back home." As the "novel" alternates between past and present, it is told from disparate points of view--those of Ka's mother and father, a young man visiting Haiti after ten years to see his blinded aunt, a wedding seamstress in New York, a Haitian-American reporter investigating a possible "dew-breaker," a man remembering a Haitian friend's long-ago disappearance as he awaits his son's birth in New York, and a popular Haitian preacher whose arrest affects lives for many years.

The novel gains much of its power from the horrors of vividly described torture and the overwhelming fear engendered by the Tonton Macoute militia. By calling up such emotionally charged memories and presenting them in a series of episodes, the author can let the personal stories unfold without having to order events so that they lead to a grand climax. What distinguishes this "novel" from a short story collection, however, is the repeating motifs that appear throughout these seemingly separate episodes (a man's widow's peak, a woman's fear of cemeteries, for example), and by the end of the novel the connections among all the characters become obvious. A vivid documentation of many of the worst human rights abuses of the century, Danticat's novel is a moving testament to the Haitians' resilient spirit and a celebration of their survival. Mary Whipple

Throughout The Dew Breaker, evil prevails in all its manifestations, particularly in the guise of authority, demanding homage from the persecuted. This novel is beautifully constructed; characters fall into place within the chapters, the infinite connections that bind one life to another clearly drawn. In each facet of her story, the author builds the momentum in this cautionary tale of horror, love, rebelliousness and hope, touched with myth and memory.

As the novel begins, a young woman gazes upon her father with eyes of love, unaware of his past. Finally confessing his carefully hidden secret, he is revealed as deeply flawed, his actions virtually unforgivable. The scar he wears on his face carries a terrible history, his life in America built on deception. In his mouth the truth is a lie. Although the father pardons himself, there are many who damn him for the monster of their nightmares.

Weaving through the chapters, we learn of those who have been touched by brutal dictatorship and oppression, where unmarried women bear fatherless children, eking out the most basic existence. Haiti, an island paradise, turns into hell under a despot's reign of terror, freedom a vague dream, while the hungry scratch for garbage, all under a starlit sky of infinite beauty. Even when these characters find a different life in America, they carry the indelible scars of Haiti in their hearts.

This passionate novel is an assemblage of powerful interrelated stories; here a chorus of voices hums, the heard and the unheard, the "disappeared", the unborn, the women whose voice boxes have been surgically removed, the desperate murmur of prayers, the eternal silence of the dead and the staccato of random gunfire. There is a staggering contrast between good and evil in The Dew Breaker, as well as the grinding reality of a world made suddenly transcendent in the bright rays of the morning sun. Horrifying, how evil walks so freely through the world, casually touching its victims, then casually strolling into the quiet evening and a peaceful existence, unexposed and unrelenting. Luan Gaines/2004.

One of the book's face pages mentions that the "Dew Breaker" is actually comprised of many shorter stories, some of which were previously published independently of one another in various journals. It takes an artist to blend these discrete stories, string them together as chapter titles, making them cohesive so that the reader understands a larger picture. Danticat does this with style, with escalating tension, and by drawing the reader into a maze of facts, characters and their personal stories with similar characteristics. All their lives have been touched by the reigns of terror under the Haitian dictators, Papa Doc and Bebe Doc Duvalier.

The novel opens with the Dew Breaker's telling his beloved daughter of his background. Prior to the confession, he had been the tortured...not the torturer. And, following this confession, the story moves back and forth in time.

One very clever touch, among many, is the portion where the Dew Breaker, now a respectable barber living a very quiet life in New York attends Christmas Eve Mass with his daughter and wife, Anne. Ka, his daughter, stares at a man she thinks to be a wanted man in Haiti. His picture appears on posters all over town because of his human rights violations. In the end, noticing the suspect bears an overall resemblance to the criminal, but is not an exact match, the reader is drawn to the fact that her own father, the Dew Breaker, altered his own appearance so as not to be recognized. He was formerly described as a very large man. No more. A parallel to the man in the pew?

Going along with this strain of disguises, the bridal dress seamstress is also sure the Dew Breaker lives across the street from her but when a nosy reporter attempts to look into the house, a neighbor tells her no one has lived there for a long time. When this is pointed out to the seamstress, she relates that no matter where she moves, he finds her. How? Because she tells her "girls" (the various women who utilize her dressmaking skills) when she is moving. That's how the Dew Breaker knows. Is this accurate? Her imagination, grown out of her own story of horror when the Dew Breaker tortured her because she would not date him?

Then there is Anne, his wife, who has known her husband's story for many years and has willing collaborated in her husband's obscure existence in order to keep a very low profile. They have no friends, cannot risk ever being recognized, seem to operate exclusively in a Haitian neighborhood. Which begs the question, wouldn't the probabilities be even greater that a criminal would heighten the chances of his recognition in a smaller neighborhood where so many have been touched by the regimes of the Duvaliers?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if the personification of horrors lives and works just down the street, a victim would be less likely to stir up a hornets nest! Nonetheless, Anne too, was touched by the Dew Breaker. Her own stepbrother was murdered by him yet she appears to believe that her stepbrother, a minister who openly preached against the regime, committed suicide. Is the author trying to show that many mechanisms are employed to stay alive? To attempt to forget? To make the best of the hand one is dealt?

Danticat employs interesting characters to tell her short stories and she effectively uses the breaks in the various narratives to grow her overall story. And those short stories also provide her with the mechanism to jump back and forth in time between Haiti and New York. The reader is transported briefly into the stories of these diverse characters, their time in history, its effects on their lives and, when blended together, they create a whole, engrossing story.

Her final coup d'etat is the story of the "Dew Breaker" himself; he is detestable, heartless, ruthless, cunning and he has become the quiet scholar, the man fascinated with the Egyptian "Book of the Dead". What does he seek there?

I gotta say the Dew Breaker should definitely be on everyone's must read list. Dandicat's voice is clear, compelling and transports you to the moment in time that she is speaking of. It's a page turner to the very end. One thing though, there were times when I was confused as to who was talking. But once you understand that there are different people telling their stories and they are all related in some way (though not all of them are related to the main character "the dew breaker"; which can have you wondering why is this story there)it works very well. She really did a great job on researching the Duvalier regime and how people were treated. It brought a lot of things to the surface and helped me to now grasp what the revolt was really about, because though I was there, I was a child who I was just happy not to have to go to school for a few months.

Danticat is enormously good for us, especially now. She reminds us of the beautiful literary spirit of Haiti... much like that glorious cadre of revolutionary Haitian women literary figures Ghislaine Charlier, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, and of course Marie Chauvet and more recently Myriam Chancy. Exquisite writers all. Danticat, like her sisters, reminds us of the rich literary legacy that truly celebrates all that is beautiful about this much maligned and misunderstood country. Danticat herself, in my view, is an accident of literary privilege, a formidably keen observer or witness to events that have happened or to what is currently happening. This story, The Dew Breaker, while a horribly true tale of interwoven lives connected gruesomely by the "beast", actually chose her; she is the extremely gifted and talented vessel that serves to receive this story.

Is there redemption for the protagonist, the shoukèt laroze himself? I don't know. Perhaps even Danticate isn't quite certain. The protagonist, an ultimately pathetic soul, is caught up in a nightmarish episode of reality --as is all of Haiti. As his daughter peels away the layers of his humanity, penetrating ever so deeper into his tortured soul to see just who he is, she too (like us) arrives at the point of moral ambiguity about her father. The skillful artistry in Danticat actually tortures us with this sense of indefiniteness ... which is what all excellent writers often do, of course. With measured steps,the author takes a daring literary plunge into the often risky arena between the short story and the novella. She triumphs wonderfully. In telling a painfully good story, Danticat presents us with real people agonizing in their search for answers, explanations and understandings. M' pa di passé ça.
Definitely recommended reading.

Alan Cambeira
Author of AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar (a novel)

Given the subject matter of The Dew Breaker, the story of a killer in Haiti who has "given in to the greatest hazard of the job... It was becoming like any another job," Edwidge Danticat has taken an enormous emotional and aesthetic risk by choosing to tell his story from his daughter's sympathetic point of view. Ms. Danticat also displays her story telling gifts by two astonishing twists in the plot and her capable handling of a central trope that reveals even as it hides the past of one of its central characters.

In The Dew Breaker, Danticat has succeeded in showing us that love, even for a monster, can have redemptive effect. And while Ka Bienaim''s father can never fully accept the grace offered to him by Anne, his wife, and Ka, his daughter-he destroys a statue of himself that was a gift from his daughter-he does live a reformed life after he leaves Haiti.

The Dew Breaker is a sublime work and the tone that Ms. Danticat maintains throughout the work captures the moral dilemma of the "hunter and the hunted." It is easy to want revenge for horrific acts that have been done to our loved ones. But killers have families and children who love them, and they are in desperate need of the kind of salvific love that Anne offers. This humane novel is an act of bravery that may bring life back to the "dead spots" of Haiti's troubled past.

This is my favorite Danticat book to date. I wasn't as much of a fan back in the days of Breath, Eyes, Memory. I thought in the case of that novel that her beautiful writing tried to disguise some leaps in the narrative. I thought she often left the story at just the most critical, difficult to write part and jumped forward, skipping over the hard stuff entirely. I thought, really, that she'd pulled the wool over the reading public's eyes by writing so beautifully we didn't notice the gaps. I'll have to go back and look at that one again to see if I still feel the same about it.

In any event, those flaws are not the case at all in this novel. Yes, there are connected stories that might have led to the same sort of problems. But Danticat has matured amazingly, which is really something considering the spotlight she's been under. She didn't HAVE to become a better writer cause she was already successful, but this proves that she set her sights high and reached them. The various stories inform each other while also standing distinct. She writes brutal material at times but with an understanding of the flawed humanity of all her characters - both the victim and the torturer. She asks questions about what sort of redemption is possible for past crimes. She deals with the hard stuff head on. She doesn't give easy answers, but that's the way it is with the best of writing. And this is some of America's best writing right now.

Danticat's a hot commodity these days. Her first two novels have received much acclaim and this effort has been much anticipated. It hasn't hurt that Haiti is very much in the spotlight as the book becomes available, with all the attendant images of violence that accompany a Haitian coup. So, all in all, reading The Dew Breakers should have been a blockbuster experience. Sadly, it was not.

The protagonist of The Dew Breaker (so named because he would habitually come for his victims in the very early morning, when the grass was wet with pre sunrise dew) is a former torturer for the Duvalier regime, now, as the book opens, a reformed family man living in suburban New York. His sadism is chronicled through a series of vignettes centering on a swath of his victims. Essentially, this novel is a loosely related series of short stories that uses the device of the protagonist as the glue that's supposed to hold the whole enterprise together. This is not an entirely successful undertaking as the protagonist is so steeped in shadow and mystery as to never truly come into focus enough to be an identifiable entity. Some of the vignettes are truly moving and, on their own, have genuine emotional impact. That impact dissipates, however, as the intrusion of the literary device that underpins the book often in fact acts to dispels emotional intensity and thus rob the narrative of its power.

Danticat has a writing style that is often described as simple and elegant but which, to my mind, often can only be described as plain. This book is easy to read by there is a decided lack of any sort of lyrical quality to the work.

However, the real problem with the book is it never even attempts to answer the questions it raises. History is full of monsters who were attentive parents, kind to their mothers and loved their pets. The question is-and Danticat broaches it-how do these freaks accommodate the inherent contradictions of their nature? History is also full of monsters who, for whatever reason, turn their back on their former life, reforming themselves into, if not something noble, at least into something no longer a monster. Where does the sadism, the cruelty, the inhumanity go when this happens? Danticat makes no effort to resolve these issues. At best, the book can be said to be infused with a sense of moral ambiguity regarding its protagonist. Even the question of whether the author intends for one to grant the torturer absolution for his sins is left indefinite.

In the final analysis, the book sinks under the burden of great expectations. It does not live up to its hype and reviews. That's not to say it's a bad book-it's not. It's just that, when all is said and done, the feeling one is left with is that this particular glass has to be viewed as half empty. That is a great disappointment given the hopes I had for the book going in.

Edwidge Danticat's _The Dew Breakers_ is a deep, emotionally moving novel that asks readers to reflect not only on the history of Haiti but also on the complexities of their own personal and national stories. The book explores how individuals deal with experiences of profound suffering. The characters cope with violence and trauma that they have either suffered through at others' hands, or have meted out to others. In this novel the past is very much part of the present; the past is the texture of the characters' dreams and the background of their waking choices.

The book speaks directly to the immigrant experience and the courage of people to endure. An organizing principle of the novel is an idea from the _Egyptian Book of the Dead_ concerning the "Ka," a double, the spiritual being of the individual, which guides the body through life and death. One of the lead characters, the so called, "Dew Breaker," who has reinvented himself as a barber in New York City, names his daughter, Ka. He often takes his daughter to Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at Egyptian art. His care of his daughter reflects his best self and his will to survive, qualities which the daughter later captures artistically and understands intuitively.

In addition, the novel shows how people's lives are interconnected with each other and woven to national histories. What the individual experiences often recapitulates the broader experience of a people or society at large. For example, various minor and major characters in the novel mirror each other, as if they are working through parts of the same experience. For instance, Claude, a criminal who has been deported to Haiti, and the dew breaker are integrally related, yet they live at different moments in time and have no knowledge of each other. Likewise, a young immigrant named Dany has an interest in the "dew breaker" that is similar to Ka's belief that she has spotted a wanted criminal at a Christmas service. Anne, Ka's mom, is similar to Dany's elderly Aunt Estine Esteme. All of these characters capture aspects of the complex experience of multi-generational dictatorship that reveberates in the Haitian immigrant community.

The novel is also structured in dual sections. "The Book of the Dead," one of the chapter titles, contrasts with "The Book of Miracles." "The Funeral Singer" contrasts with "The Bridal Seamstress." These sections give the reader access to layered connections that the individual characters themselves are not consciously aware of.

The dialogue among characters is likewise fragmentary and circular; often people are on the verge of speaking but refrain. In a later part of the book, another character might express a similar idea in an entirely different context. On some level, characters know each other without knowing the precise details of each other's histories. This knowledge ironically comes from experiences with others whose lives are similar. The structure of the novel hints at this understanding.

The quote for my review comes from "The Funeral Singer" section of the novel. At the end of this section, a group of immigrant friends celebrates in a New York City Haitian restaurant after taking the GED exam. The friends are unsure if they have passed, yet regardless of the results, there is restrained optimism for a brighter future. (Danticat solves, delightfully, one of the G.E.D. math problems in her acknowledgements.)

There are many wonderful reviews of the book on Amazon.com that shed light on the novel and Danticat's lucid prose. Danticat's writing, which is both finely detailed and beautifully spare, enables readers to create in their own minds a rich, layered world. Reading her novel is a gratifying learning experience; it remains true to the human experience.

This is a magesterial work.