Product Description

We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”--or torturer--s an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. It firmly establishes her as one of America’s most essential writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26469 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-08
• Released on: 2005-03-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400034291
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, the prolific Edwidge Danticat spins a series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals to his artist daughter that he is not, as she believes, a prison escapee, but a former prison guard, skilled in torture and the other violent control methods of a brutal regime. "Your father was the hunter," he confesses, "he was not the prey." Into this brilliant opening, Danticat tucks the seeds of all that follows: the tales of the prison guard's victims, of their families, of those who recognize him decades later on the streets of New York, of those who never see him again, but are so haunted that they believe he's still pursuing them. (A dew breaker, we learn, is a government functionary who comes in the early morning to arrest someone or to burn a house down, breaking the dew on the grass that he crosses.) Although it is frustrating, sometimes, to let go of one narrative thread to follow another, The Dew Breaker is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Haitian-born Danticat's third novel (after The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory) focuses on the lives affected by a "dew breaker," or torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier's regime. Each chapter reveals the titular man from another viewpoint, including that of his grown daughter, who, on a trip she takes with him to Florida, learns the secret of his violent past and those of the Haitian boarders renting basement rooms in his Brooklyn home. This structure allows Danticat to move easily back and forth in time and place, from 1967 Haiti to present-day Florida, tracking diverse threads within the larger narrative. Some readers may think that what she gains in breadth she loses in depth; this is a slim book, and Danticat does not always stay in one character's mind long enough to fully convey the complexities she seeks. The chapters—most of which were published previously as stories, with the first three appearing in the New Yorker—can feel more like evocative snapshots than richly textured portraits. The slow accumulation of details pinpointing the past's effects on the present makes for powerful reading, however, and Danticat is a crafter of subtle, gorgeous sentences and scenes. As the novel circles around the dew breaker, moving toward final episodes in which, as a young man and already dreaming of escape to the U.S., he performs his terrible work, the impact on the reader hauntingly, ineluctably grows.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

On January 1, 1804, Haiti became an independent nation. Its citizens, however, have yet to find themselves in a land that is truly free. Over the last two centuries, coups, massacres and dictators have emptied the country's coffers and inflicted unspeakable violence upon its people. With the recent resignation -- be it by choice or by force -- of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the presence of rebel forces, political stability still seems to be a long way off. For the Haitian characters in The Dew Breaker, any hopeful dreams for the future are compromised, if not completely eclipsed, by the nightmares of their past.

This courageous book, composed of nine interrelated short stories, is about recognition and redemption. It addresses the fraught question of how to repair or reclaim lives destroyed by one man's violent career." That man is a former shoukèt laroze, a "dew breaker," one of the government's henchmen, so named because of the time of day when they usually capture their victims. In the opening story, "The Book of the Dead," we meet Ka Bienaimé, a sculptor whose only subject is her father, a solitary man prone to deep silences that she attributes to the year he spent in prison. Ka has just sold her first completed sculpture, and her father has traveled with her to Tampa from their home in Brooklyn so that she can personally deliver the piece to its new owner, a famous Haitian-born television actress. Before the transfer can take place, her father sneaks out of the hotel room with the mahogany figure and tosses it into a lake. He later explains to Ka that he does not deserve such an honor, that he was not in prison as the prey but worked in it as the hunter, in which capacity he killed numerous people.

This admission prompts Ka to re-examine all the assumptions she had once made about her father. "I had always thought that my father's only ordeal was that he'd left his country and moved to a place where everything from the climate to the language was so unlike his own, a place where he never quite seemed to fit in, never appeared to belong. The only thing I can grasp now, as I drive way beyond the speed limit down yet another highway, is why the unfamiliar might have been so comforting, rather than distressing, to my father. And why he has never wanted the person he was, is, permanently documented in any way."

The face of evil is not easily forgotten. Despite her father's efforts to carve out a quiet existence nearly three decades and a vast ocean away from the scene of his crimes, he is far from anonymous. There are many Haitian immigrants living in the dew breaker's Brooklyn neighborhood, many people for whom the mere sight of him can trigger memories of loss, of murdered relatives and endless grief. Edwidge Danticat, who came to America from Haiti at the age of 12, takes us, story by story, into their worlds and exposes those wounds. She is a master at creating community on the page, finding the casual ways that one life would naturally intersect with another. (Disclosure: Though I do not know Danticat, I have had two professional interactions with her: I republished her work in anthologies that I edited.)

In "The Bridal Seamstress," a spinster who has recently retired admits that the dew breaker is the real reason behind her sudden decision to close down her business. " 'He asked me to go dancing with him one night,' Beatrice said, putting her feet back in her sandals. 'I had a boyfriend, so I said no. That's why he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon. This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.' "

We discover that there are three young men renting rooms in the basement of the dew breaker's two-story house -- Dany, Michel and a third, who in a more light-hearted story, "Seven," is preparing for the arrival of his wife, whom he has not seen since the morning after their one-night honeymoon, when he boarded a plane for New York with his suitcases and the promise that he would soon send for her. When we meet Dany again, in "Night Talkers," he is in Haiti visiting his aunt, the only remaining member of his family, because he has news that he wants to give her in person:

"The man who killed his parents was now a barber in New York. He had a wife and a grown daughter, who visited often. Some guys from work had told him that a barber was renting a room in the basement of his house. When he went to the barbershop to ask about the room, he recognized the barber as the man who had waved the gun at him outside his parents' house."

The title story transports readers back to the last days of François Duvalier, to the dew breaker's final, lurid act of torture and to the unlikely meeting between him and the woman whose fateful presence offers him the hope of forgiveness.

As with her earlier fiction, Danticat's writing in The Dew Breaker is well-crafted and imbued with imagery. Even a description of something as ordinary as hair becomes a symbol of a character's internal turmoil: "Beatrice had unbraided her cornrows so that her hair, now high and thick, looked like an angry cloud, a swollen halo floating a few inches above her."

She delivers her most beautiful and arresting prose when describing the most brutal atrocities and their emotional aftermath. In Danticat's hands, pain becomes poetry as a preacher is dragged to the torture chamber of a Haitian jail. He feels his sense of self being left behind, "with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and cracks in the concrete." In reconstructing such specific and personal memories of a brutal political past, Danticat awakens us to the beauty and terror that can exist in everyday life in Haiti. The Dew Breaker is a brilliant book, undoubtedly the best one yet by an enormously talented writer.

Reviewed by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Gave me new understanding of Haiti over the last 20 years
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.

"Atonement...was possible and available for everyone."
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

A legacy of horror
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.