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's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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 DanquahCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Three Haitian women living in New York drink to "the terrible days behind us and the uncertain days ahead," thus succinctly denoting the resonant theme of Danticat's beautifully lucid fourth work of fiction: the baffling legacy of violence and the unanswerable questions of exile. In compelling and richly imagined linked stories of the Haitian diaspora, the author of The Farming of the Bones (1999) portrays the children of parents who either perpetuated or suffered the cruelties of the island's bloody dictatorships, young women and men who struggle to make sense of the madness that poisoned their childhoods. The book's pivotal, and most riveting, sections portray a man who works for the state as a torturer, or "dew breaker," until a catastrophic encounter with a heroic preacher induces him to flee to New York, where his sculptor daughter finally learns of his past under caustically ironic circumstances. Danticat's masterful depiction of the emotional and spiritual reverberations of tyranny and displacement reveals the intricate mesh of relationships that defines every life, and the burden of traumatic inheritances: the crimes and tragedies that one generation barely survives, the next must reconcile. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Courageous. . . . Beautiful. . . . The Dew Breaker is brilliant book, undoubtedly the best one yet by an enormously talented writer.” --The Washington Post Book World

“Ms. Danticat’s most persuasive, organic performance yet. . . . Each tale in The Dew Breaker could stand on its own as a beautifully made story, but they come together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife.” —The New York Times

“Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose. . . . An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.” --People

“Luminous. . . . This is a tale of crime and punishment in the great tradition of Dostoevsky.” —The Baltimore Sun

“A devastating story of love, delusion, and history.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Danticat’s gift is to combine both sympathy and clarity in a moral tangle that becomes as tight as a Haitian community.” —Time

“Breathtaking . . . With terrifying wit and flowered pungency, Edwidge Danticat has managed over the past 10 years to portray the torment of the Haitian people . . . In The Dew Breaker, Danticat has written a Haitian truth: prisoners all, even the jailers.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Danticat [is] surely one of contemporary fiction’s most sensitive conveyors of hope’s bittersweet persistence in the midst of poverty and violence.” –The Miami Herald

“Thrillingly topical . . . [The Dew Breaker] shines. . . . Danticat leads her readers into the underworld. It’s furnished like home.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Stunning . . . Beautifully written fiction [that] seamlessly blend[s] the personal and political, [and] asks questions about shame and guilt, forgiveness and redemption, and the legacy of violence . . . haunting.” –USA Today

“Fascinating. . . . Danticat is a fine and serious fiction writer who has slowly grown as an artist with each book she has written.” –The Chicago Tribune

“In its varied characters, its descriptive power and its tightly linked images and themes, [The Dew Breaker] is a rewarding and affecting read, rich with insights not just about Haiti but also about the human condition.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“[The Dew Breaker] is, most profoundly, about love’s healing powers. From its marvelous descriptions of place to the gentle opening up of characters, this is a book that engages the imagination.” –Elle

“With her grace and her imperishable humanity . . . [Danticat] makes sadness beautiful.” –The New York Observer

“Danticat has an emotional imagination capable of evoking empathy for both predator and prey.” –Entertainment Weekly

“With characteristic lyricism and grace, Danticat probes the painful legacy of a time when sons turned against their fathers, children were orphaned, and communities were torn apart.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Delicate and poetic . . . Danticat [is] more than a storyteller, she’s a writer. . . . Her voice is like an X-Acto knife–precise, sharp and perfect for carving out small details.” –The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose . . . An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.” –People

“[Danticat] fuses the beauty and tragedy of her native land, a land her characters want to forget and remember all at once.” –Ebony

“In these stories Edwidge Danticat continues to speak eloquently for those who in losing their sorrowful homeland have lost their voices.” –The Boston Globe

“Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat presents simple truths…this, the novelist seems to be saying is how you understand; here is the primer for survival.” –The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"From the universally acclaimed author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker" - a torturer - a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality." "We meet him late in his life. He is a quiet man, a husband and father, a hardworking barber, a kindly landlord to the men who live in a basement apartment in his home. He is a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, recognizable by the terrifying scar on 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: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter; his sometimes unsuspecting, sometimes apprehensive neighbors, tenants, and clients. And we meet some of his victims." In the book's powerful denouement, we return to the Haiti of the dew breaker's past, to his last, desperate act of violence, and to his first encounter with the woman who will offer him a form of redemption - albeit imperfect - that will change him forever.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

It's beautifully written fiction about the real-life horror that is Haiti. Seamlessly blending the personal and political, it deals with what happens to a country and its people when mothers and fathers disappear for their political transgressions. —Bob Minzesheimer

The New York Times

Each tale in The Dew Breaker could stand on its own as a beautifully made story, but they come together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces to create a picture of this man's terrible history and his and his victims' afterlife. Some of the puzzle pieces are missing of course, but this is a matter of design. It is a measure of Ms. Danticat's fierce, elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as much as her piercing, indelible words. — Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post

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. — Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

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. 60,000 first printing. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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