The Dew Breaker

by Edwidge Danticat

Paperback, 2005

Status

Checked out

Publication

Vintage (2005), Edition: Reprint, 256 pages

Description

Story of a man known as a "dew breaker," a Haitian torturer, whose past crimes lie beneath his new American reality.

User reviews

LibraryThing member lauralkeet
"The Dew Breaker" is a Creole term for "torturer," an allusion to those who would use violence to shatter morning peace. The dictatorships of François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") were rife with oppression. Mercenaries known as macoutes roamed the streets; hired assassins took
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care of those who were too outspoken. This short story collection weaves together the lives of several Haitian immigrants in New York City, whose lives were affected by one particular "Dew Breaker."

There are nine stories in this book; I found three especially good:
- Book of the Dead: a young woman and her father drive to Florida to deliver a sculpture to a famous Haitian-American actress. The young woman learns of her father's secret past.
- Night Talkers: a young man returns to a Haitian mountain village to visit his elderly aunt. Dany and his Aunt Estina survived a fire that killed his parents and blinded Estina. Dany believes he has found the killer in New York. The way he shares the story with his aunt, and the events that follow, make for a very moving tale.
- The Dew Breaker: in the last story, we learn the torturer's personal history and point of view. Danticat manages to portray the villain as human and almost a victim, without excusing his crimes. And there is some sense of hope when the man finds a way to break the cycle of violence.

While each story is well-written, the real power of The Dew Breaker is in the subtle connections that knit together characters and events. It requires focused reading; I frequently re-read passages from earlier stories to confirm the reappearance of a character. This is a case where the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
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LibraryThing member msf59
We are introduced to a Haitian man, living in Brooklyn. He emigrated here, over thirty years ago. He is a good father and a good husband. He also has a very dark past, which involved, working as a prison guard, in his homeland. Rumors of atrocities abound...
We are then shown separate stories, of
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the lives of other Haitians, as they deal with the struggles of life and each of them has some connection, with the “Dew Breaker”, (or torturer).
This was my first novel, by this author and I was quite impressed. Her haunting prose, is beautiful but also tough and unflinching. It may not always be an easy or smooth read but it will make an indelible impression.

“And for the rest of the night we raise our glasses, broken and unbroken alike, to the terrible days behind us and the uncertain ones ahead.”
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LibraryThing member thesmellofbooks
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member bcquinnsmom
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member narwhaltortellini
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member labfs39
Edwidge Danticat never writes books that are easy to read, but they are always incredibly beautiful and moving. The Dew Breaker is no exception. It is a novel made up of a series of short vignettes. Tying them together is the character of "the dew breaker", a Haitian macoute who specializes in
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torture. In some ways the book begins at the end, when the dew breaker is a husband, father, and shop owner in New York. He is trying to be a good man and a good father, and I felt sympathetic towards his situation. Through each of the succeeding chapters, most of which were published separately as short stories, we are taken back into the dew breaker's past, into Haiti's past, until with the last chapter we see how it all began.

Haiti is a beautiful country that has been torn and tortured by conquerors, dictators, neighbors, and nature. Edwidge Danticat writes of the beauty and sorrow of Haiti in the same breath, with the same words, and as a result, I cannot separate the two in my mind. Every time I read one of her books, I linger emotionally in a place of exquisite sadness, thinking of the plight and the strength of a desperate people.
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LibraryThing member kalobo
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
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short story/novel mix.
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LibraryThing member chickletta
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,
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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.
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LibraryThing member jepeters333
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member AnneliM
Set in Haiti and New York. The grown daughter of a quiet, loving father finds out about his past as a "dew breaker", a torturer under the old Haitian regime under Duvalier. A series of vignettes, only loosely related, reveal the life in Haiti during that time that her father and mother had until
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then tried to keep from her.
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LibraryThing member bethany2784
a little confusing, not as impacting as her first book
LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
A montage of stories about a handful of people affected by events in Haiti during the 1960's, now living in New York at the beginning of the 21st century. The unifying character, a barber whose very American daughter tells the first modern tale in which she learns of her father's true past, is the
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embodiment of evil for his victims, yet his life holds a more complicated secret about love and redemption. A deceptively quick and easy read.
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LibraryThing member andreablythe
"Your father was the hunter," he confesses, "he was not the prey." Thus, the "dew breaker" as he was called confesses to his daughter his past as a prison guard adn torturer in Haiti. The following chapters center about the father, some from the point of view of his family and some of his former
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victims.

It's not my favorite of Danticat's books. The individual stories that make up each chapter are just a little too disconnected for me. I couldn't always see the connection between the characters, except that they are all tied to Haiti and often the brutality encountered there. However, Danticat draws all the richness the human experience out of her clean and simple lines, and each chapter taken on it's own offers interesting, real world characters who experience sorrow, love, regret, pleasure, and redemption.
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LibraryThing member miyurose
This just didn't grab me. The first two stories were great, and then the book started to lose me. Maybe in a different frame of mind...
LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
For me, this book makes more sense as a collection of short stories than as a novel. While some of the stories focus on the same characters, they're placed in such a way as to remove all of the suspense. Additionally, their interspersing throughout the full of the book means that you don't become
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particularly engaged with any one of the characters. This might not be such a problem except in that all of the stories/chapters are clearly supposed to work in such a way that one full narrative is achieved. I'd like to say that that happens, but I don't think the book ever really succeeds in webbing together the stories in a smooth affective manner. Instead, many of the characters seem to sound similar, without enough individuality or voice to separate them from the rest of the work, and the breaks are jarring. Even now, looking back, I find the first story in the book the most affecting and engaging---after that first story, nothing caught my attention or felt so unique, and there was, literally, simply no suspense.

Danticat's prose is, simply, too simple for this book--the voices are too similar, the plot/meaning too sparse, and the effect too broad. There is beauty in some of the simplicity here, but readers are left running to catch up and understand how the work comes togehter, often uninterested in the moment-to-moment reports as given since characters are never really clear enough to draw empathy. In general, I'd recommend many of these "chapters" as short stories in themselves, and I believe I even once read one in an anthology, but I would not recommend the book on as a whole, but for readers who read the three clearly interlocking stories, primarily the first and the last.
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LibraryThing member grheault
The hangman, the soldier who kills via drones, the abusive prison guard, who go home at five to the family -- what goes on in their minds, hearts -- this has always fascinated me. So I had high hopes for the book, whose book jacket says it "explores the world of ... a man whose brutal crimes in the
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country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality. The first chapter wowed me, but then many of the succeeding chapters seemed like disconnected short stories with not the relevance I'd hoped to the first chapters. Writing seemed rushed and imprecise at times, but the last chapters were fine, just not enough of them to satisfy.
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LibraryThing member WarBetweentheBooks
In order to read The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat I found that I like it better if I thought of it as a collection of short stories with a common theme rather than as a full length novel. At the same time however I really liked trying to see what each story had in common and how they related to
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each other. Every story was based on a set of people who had been affected by what had happened in Haiti and how they were living their life after the tyrant who had been running the country was taken from power. Every person in each story was keeping a secret and lying to someone whom is supposed to be close to them to keep their past hidden. Most of them seemed ashamed by what they had done to or by them. Others did not even realize that what they had done had been wrong in the first place. My favorite story had to be “Monkey Tails” because of the fact that it was not as depressing as the rest of them. I liked the idea that his life had turned out well despite what had happened when he was a child. In this story it was the mother and most of the town who were in on the secret. It seemed to me that the only person who did not know who his father was had been Michel. The lie that his mother tells seems less condemnable to me because it seems to me that it is told for less selfish reasons and it does not negatively affect so many people. In the end of the story we even find out that he keeps to the same story that his mother told him whenever people ask about his father. I like the story of “The Bridal Seamstress” because of the very opposite reasons that I liked “Monkey Tails”. This story showed how what happened to her in Haiti affected her and how she was never able to move away from it. Beatrice Saint Fort is a famous bridal seamstress who is about to get her name in the paper and yet she believes that the man who hurt her so long ago because she would not dance with him is following her everywhere and living on her street. Even when Alina Cajuste checks out the house and tells her that it is abandoned Beatrice only thinks that this is the most logical thing because the man must have to live in abandoned houses in order to hide from the authorities. The only thing that I am unsure of is how the father from the first story relates to each of the stories. He could be the father in “Monkey Tails” and the man in “The Bridal Seamstress” but something makes me think that he is not because I can’t wrap my head around all of the places he would have had to have been in such a short time. While I liked some of the stories I have to say that for the majority of the book I did not enjoy it. When she decided to have a different voice for every chapter she sacrificed being able to go into more depth into the characters and because I was continually meeting new people in a new setting I was unable to really become attached to any of them. Some stories I wish had been longer and others I just could not get into.
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LibraryThing member rachelhunnell1
This book is a collection of stories about a Haitian family trying to survive the political chaos and violence that dominated much of Haiti. The story tells of the emotional scarring and dealing with emotional baggage that results from a life of pain. The daughter of the main character tries to
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understand her father's silence about his past, only to learn that he may not be a victim in the way that she thought. An excellent resource for a world lit class or history class, with a lot of cultural background. This book is not a light read and deals with a lot of issues that students from difficult backgrounds would be able to relate to. Teachers would be able to use this book to create an entire unit about the revolutions in Haiti, social studies, language, post-colonial countries, the list is endless.
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LibraryThing member LynnB
This story is told through the interconnected stories of a Haitian prison guard and his former victims or victims' family members, all of whom are making new lives for themselves in New York City. The characters are complex. The former prison guard is working as a barber, and adored by his adult
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daughter who believes him to be a victim of the Duvalier regime, not a part of it. All are affected by the lives and people they left behind in Haiti.

The stories do not all come together towards a single resolution. There are no dramatic confrontations among the characters from each story. But, together, the paint a picture of survival, of picking up the pieces and rebuilding a life.
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LibraryThing member astrologerjenny
This woman writes really beautifully. This collection of linked stories explores the relationship between hunter and prey, during the dictatorship in Haiti. The main protagonist is one of the hunters, a man who commits terrible atrocities before he makes a mistake in following an order, and has to
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run from his masters. At first, he changes his story, so that it’s believed he was a victim of the regime, but eventually he has to confess – and the first story in this book is his confession to his grown daughter.

The protagonists of these stories are the many people who surround this man – his victims and their survivors, the people who fight against the dictatorship, the ones who abet it, and the bystanders. Danticat moves artfully through time and space - through this shadowy time in Haiti, among immigrants in the US, and sometimes back to Haiti in search of answers. There is the truth of what happens, and then there are the tales that people tell, the ways they live with the roles they’ve played.
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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
This is an amazing book, pure and simple. The plot is as remarkable as the telling. What appear to be disconnected short stories are really different connections to one man, the Dew Breaker. In Haiti during the dictatorial 1960s this man was responsible for torturing and killing innocent people.
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Years later, with his evil past behind him, the Dew Breaker is trying to live a quiet life as a barber in Brooklyn, New York. Through the various chapters we meet his connections - his family, his victims, his community. His past slowly comes out in small segments. It behooves the reader to pay close attention to the detail Danticat gives to each chapter, to each story. A mystery from a previous chapter could be solved in the next. A seemingly meaningless character in one chapter becomes the key to everything in another. This was definitely one of my favorites.
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LibraryThing member technodiabla
I liked the individual stories-- especially the way minor characters in one story were the main character in another. The collection does raise some interesting questions about what people are capable of in desperate situations, and how to appropriately judge their actions. I did find the threads
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hard to follow through the whole collection, hard to keep characters straight especially through time and across the globe.
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LibraryThing member Laura400
This is one of those books that was so splendid I didn't want to finish it. It is a collection of linked stories about Haitians in Haiti and in America, portraying torturers and the tortured, immigrants and those who remain, and their children, that sketches the impact of both the deliberate
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horrors and the everyday deprivation on generations. Essential mysteries in the stories are left unsolved or unclear, as the stories portray the essential unknowability of even those we are closest to.
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LibraryThing member John
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member b.masonjudy
Upon finishing "The Dew Breaker" I found myself moved and also disappointed. The latter mainly because not all the stories in the collection were nearly as powerful as the final two stories: "The Funeral Singer" and "The Dew Breaker." The variation in narrator's voice is jarring across some of the
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stories not necessarily changing points-of-view but the psychic distance and given that this is supposed to be a novel and not a collection I would have expected more continuity. Nonetheless it's a great read and affords some insightful discourse on the experience of a group of Haitians who lived through the regime and immigrated to the United States.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2004

Physical description

256 p.; 5.2 inches

ISBN

1400034299 / 9781400034291

Local notes

Fiction
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