Rating: 
Summary: Hauntingly Beautiful Read
Review:
What a great, great read. Author Edwidge Danticat brilliantly weaves a series of stories that reveal much about Haiti during the era of the Duvaliers. But The Dew Breaker is not so much about Haiti as it is about the Haitian people, both the perpetrators and the innocents, of the that brutal Duvalier regime. Danticat's simple arresting prose is dead-on as she so vividly and intensely relates the depth of human emotions of these tragic victims. Brilliant is the way Ms Danticat intertwines the stories of these individuals who find themselves in the same New York City neighborhood many years later living lives of haunted memories and deep remorse.
The Today Show Book Club got it right again. The Dew Breaker is another highly recommended read.
Rating:
Summary: Remembrance of a lost soul
Review: The "Dew Breaker" raises the question as to whether someone who murdered and tortured others can ever be forgiven or even understood. The story revolves around a man who fled Haiti and now lives a new life as a barber in Brooklyn. When we first meet him, he is a pensive and spiritual man who has a love for Egyptian mythos. We initially like him, or at least this current version of himself. With each new chapter, Danticat gives a new first-person narrative from other Haitians. Some of them had encounters with a past version of the man, when he was a macoute, a cruel assassin and torturer, called a "Dew Breaker," working for the Haitian government's version of the Gestapo. Our initial opinions of the Dew Breaker come into conflict with the accounts of his past deeds from other characters. He is a very complex character, painted lavishly by Danticat. We can judge him however we want, and accept or condemn any one of the versions of his character that Danticat presents to us.
One of the book's best features is its nontraditional structure, which Danticat sculpts beautifully throughout. Although every chapter of the book is written in first person, the identity of the narrator shifts with each chapter. Though it is disconcerting at first, it keeps the book fresh and engaging. The book goes backwards in time, developing the Dew Breaker and touching on his tragic past. The remaining characters in the story reflect different aspects of this man and his monstrous past. While the story makes more and more sense as we delve further back into time, the real treat of the book is Danticat's writing style. It is both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. She uses colors for fluid description, and integrates Haitian words and proverbs into the writing seamlessly. Her writing is full of symbolism, and has very dark undertones. This novel should be admired, if not for its beautiful language and structure, then for its thought provoking content.
Rating: 
Summary: "Atonement...was possible and available for everyone."
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Framing The Unmasterable, Memoried Past
Review: 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)
Rating: 
Summary: The Dew Breakers never quite lives up to its hype.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful and beautiful new novel
Review: Edwidge Danticat's new novel, her third, is right up there with her first, Breath, Eyes, Memory, though very different. It's an elliptical novel, with much mystery. The title character is not seen directly until the final, title story. Instead he is seen through the eyes of his family (The Book of the Dead, The Book of Miracles), his victims (Night Talkers), victims not necessarily his own (Water Child, The Bridal Seamstress, Monkey Tails, The Funeral Singer), and his tenants (Seven). Together, the stories piece together the Dew Breaker (and people like him, and people who suffered from or survived people like him) from different angles. This is a book that defies the easy classifications of good and evil. It is about love, compassion, hope, regret, forgiveness, and understanding. But it has no easy answers. In many ways, it doesn't answer the questions it asks, allowing each reader to judge the Dew Breaker for him/herself. This is a timeless book, but given Aristide's recent exile from Haiti and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, it is a very timely book as well.
Rating:
Summary: A Highly Accomplished and Extraordinarily Powerful Novel
Review: Edwidge Danticat's third novel, THE DEW BREAKER, arrives in bookstores on the heels of major turmoil in the author's native Haiti: in February Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned the presidency and fled the country, sparking nationwide riots and the involvement of U.S. marines. These newspaper headlines make THE DEW BREAKER all the more topical and meaningful --- perhaps even more important --- on these shores, and the emotions in the story are all the more intense and vivid for the immediacy these events lend them. But to Danticat's considerable credit, this highly accomplished and extraordinarily powerful novel does not need these concurrent events to engage and move the reader; instead THE DEW BREAKER disinters the country's tumultuous past to reveal how generations of Haitians live in constant upheaval, no matter how far from their country they travel. Danticat structures THE DEW BREAKER as a series of revealing vignettes, each following a different set of characters and tracing its own narrative arc. What keeps it from being relegated to the recent --- and frustrating --- trend of novels-in-short-stories is the focused cohesiveness of its chapters: each examines a different facet of a much larger issue while contributing significantly to a larger storyline. In "The Book of the Dead," a young Brooklyn sculptor and art teacher named Ka Bienaimé learns that her father was not an inmate in a Haitian prison, as she has believed all her life, but a torturer --- a "dew breaker" --- under dictator Francois Duvalier during the 1960s. As her mother explains, "Your father was the hunter. He was not the prey." But as she tries to accept this news, she begins to question her parents' view of Haiti and wonders whether "maybe his past offered more choices than either hunter or prey." The story-chapters that follow travel back and forth between New York and Haiti, between the unfulfilled hope of America and the crushing disillusion of the island country. But each segment of the novel somehow refers back to Ka's father and the agony and misery he inflicted on his people. In "Night Talkers," Dany, an immigrant in New York, travels back to Haiti to visit his aunt Estina, who raised him after his parents were murdered. In "Monkey Tails," Dany's roommate Michel recounts his friend's escape from the country during the riots. Another roommate, unnamed in "Seven," saves money to bring his wife over from Port-au-Prince, only to find that seven years apart, coupled with the stresses of their new life in America, have dramatically altered their relationship. All three men live in the apartment basement next to the home of Ka's parents, who run a barber shop and are fixtures in New York's Haitian community; this connection binds them all together in a larger, overarching narrative. Danticat also gives voice to people who felt Ka's father's cruelty directly. The title character in "The Bridal Seamstress" shows a reporter the scars on her feet where, after she declined his advance, he whipped all the skin off her soles and made her walk the long trip on bloody bare feet. In "The Funeral Singer," Rézia, whose husband he killed, takes classes to earn her high school degree, which is meaningless to her small but successful restaurant, but allows her to form a friendship with two of her classmates. In telling these stories from these different viewpoints, Danticat creates a makeshift community, an ever-shifting shadow society of the characters' native Haiti. The violence and brutality the title character inflicts on his people, therefore, exists not in a vacuum, but in a very specific context. Danticat is a writer blessed with both the curiosity to wonder how people can enact such cruelties on others and the wisdom to know that the answers are frighteningly complex and utterly impossible to explain in words. The task is futile, but as THE DEW BREAKER undeniably proves, the effort is worthwhile, even merciful. In the end, Danticat does not judge her main character or anyone else, but merely reminds us that "atonement, reparation, was possible and available for everyone." --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
Rating:
Summary: Redemption Song
Review: 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 Bienaimé'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.
Rating:
Summary: Staring evil in the face
Review: He is a nameless, middle-aged immigrant, unremarkable except for a hideous scar on his face. He is happily married, has a grown daughter and lives a quiet, unobtrusive life in a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. And he has a past he can't run away from: he was a "dew breaker", so called because of their practice of breaking in to homes at the crack of dawn while the dew still lay on the ground to arrest suspects and drag them off to jail and death; a former Tonton Macoute, one of Baby Doc's murderous thugs who kept the population in abject terror in Duvalier's Haiti. Danticat's exquisitely written novel is more like a series of interconnected short stories, each one integral in itself, and yet each one related to the whole. We meet people who have had their homes and their lives stolen by Duvalier's goons. We see others who have escaped from terror in their homeland, only to see the face of evil in the faces of everyone they meet. And we meet the dew breaker himself, an ordinary man you'd meet on the street any day, who allowed himself to be transformed into a monster. What kind of person becomes a torturer? He joined the Tonton Macoutes at nineteen, after Duvalier's army troops appropriated his family's land. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. He uses his power to appropriate free meals in the best restaurants, free rent, and free access to other men's wives and daughters. He rises through the ranks through becoming expert at vicious interrogations of dissidents; he's the best at his job. One of his former victims says of him, "He thought he was God." The dew breaker meets his nemesis at the hands of another victim, a local priest who has been preaching dissent against the dictatorship. The dew breaker is ordered to shoot him outside his own church, but arrests him instead and has him dragged to his own private interrogation chamber at headquarters. The preacher, a gentle, mild-mannered individual, manages to inflict a horrible wound on the dew-breaker's face before being killed. But being the victim for once instead of the victimized transforms the dew-breaker. He's had enough. He meets his own salvation -- and possible redemption -- in the form of the woman who helps cure the wound on his face and later accompanies him to America. Although she's the relative of one of his victims, she can see the humanity hidden inside him. They will live quietly in Brooklyn, minding their own business, harming no one. All he has to do is figure out how to live with himself for the rest of his life. In 244 pages, Danticat shows us the face of evil and its effect on the perpetrator, his victims, his own family and everyone he's touched. The book moves back and forth across decades from the 1960s to the present, from Brooklyn to Haiti and back again, a seamless trip across time, space, and the tortured inner self of an ultimately pathetic individual. Is there redemption for the dew-breaker? We don't know, and Danticat doesn't tell us; just as she leaves it to the reader to decide which in the end is suffering the most: the dew-breaker himself, or the broken lives he's left in his wake.
Rating:
Summary: a terrible beauty
Review: I feel bad using a word like "beautiful" to describe a book in which torture figures so prominently, but Danticat is a fantastic writer whose control of the language is gorgeous. There's nothing flashy or self-congratulatory about her spare descriptions and images - it's just perfect. Every so often an angel will rise from a dream or a fragrance will be picked up from a handkerchief -- and you're transported. It's like drinking coffee with a friend and then just glancing out the window to discover that you're in a Haitian valley or a new section of Brooklyn. The world seems wonderful in that moment, but even then you know that surprises can be brutal as well as brilliant. Her book is full of surprises, yet it also moves inevitably to the title story in the end. In bits and pieces we learn more about the central mystery, moving into the heart by indirection, overhearing the stories of neighbors, tenants, and relatives, picking up the unexamined shards of truth and sussing out the gossip. The notes of redemption surface briefly in the din of denial, anger flashes through sentimental projection and idealism, and a portrait of Haiti emerges, soaked in blood, guilt, vision, sorrow, and hope. The diaspora of which most of the characters are a part seems a blessing because the charnel house from which they come echoes with the cries of the tortured, the terrified, the tyrants. Haiti is the dark jewel of our hemisphere, the island of hope and despair, beauty and poverty, love and torture. With poetic compression and heartbreaking compassion, Edwidge Danticat brings us face to face with mystery, grief, and life. Like the girl on the cover, the reader contemplates a lake of sorrow, loss, and guilt; you emerge from this book refreshed but wrinkled with immersion.
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