Bookish Thoughts: The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

I thought today I would do a combined post with a couple of teasers and a review of a book I read last week. I imagine there will not be many people around this week given Christmas is so close. I had planned to take next week off from blogging, but I may post my top ten books read list if I can put it together (it's proving to be more of a challenge than I thought--can I count three books as one since they are a series, each book dependent on the other? To make it easier for myself, I just might!). I have two more reviews going up later this week of Christmas-themed books I read, which I can't wait to share with you all.

To those who celebrate, I hope you have a very Merry Christmas!

First Paragraph of The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat:

My father is gone.  I'm slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from two men, one the manager of the hotel where we're staying and the other a policeman. They're both waiting for me to explain what's become of my father.

Teaser from The Dew Breaker, page 20:

"Ka, I don't deserve a statue," he says again, this time much more slowly, "not a whole one, at least. You see, Ka, your father was a hunter, he was not the prey."

and from page 93:

Estina Estéme lived in a valley between two lime-green mountains and a giant waterfall, which sprayed a find mist over the banana grove that surrounded her one-room house and the teal ten-place mausoleum that harbored the bones of many of her forebears. Her nephew recognized the house as soon as he saw it. 

What do you think? Would you keep reading?  

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Knopf Publishing; 2004

Fiction; 244 pgs

From Goodreads: 

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 -- is 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.

I first read something by Edwidge Danticat three years ago and loved it. I went on to read two more of her books, and loved them as well. She's a brilliant author who is able to put into words so well the struggle and hardships endured by Haitians through history. She also captures well the immigrant experience in her books. I have had my copy of The Dew Breaker since it came out, but for some reason put off reading it until now. 

I wish I had read a few of the reviews out there before going into this one. It was not what I expected, and it hurt my enjoyment of it. I expected a typical novel, and The Dew Breaker reads more like a collection of loosely connected stories. I kept waiting for everything to come together with some sort of common conclusion in the end. When that didn't happen, I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied. I almost want to go back and read it again, now that I know what to expect. Maybe some day I will.

That aside, The Dew Breaker is made up of several poignant stories about various characters who have suffered throughout their lives and are just trying to make it today. The stories all either directly or indirectly center around the title character, the dew breaker, or torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier's regime, who irrevocably influenced their lives. The stories take the reader between the past and the present. You meet both men and women, the victims and the family of victims of the dew breaker as well as his own family, both his daughter and his wife, and himself. You see a man who has completely remade his life and is a gentler kinder person, and yet his past reverberates long after in the lives he has touched--including his own daughter who has only just found out who her father once was.

What stands out most about this book for me is how it made me feel as I was reading. The sadness, the anger, the frustration, and also the hope of the characters. The story of the pastor who spoke out against injustice--how brave and yet how dangerous! Another of my favorite stories was the one of the young reporter who interviews the retiring seamstress. The language and the words not spoken . . . I liked everything about it. It was a very moving story.

While The Dew Breaker was not what I expected, it is one I have come to appreciate the more I reflect on it. Edwidge Danticat continues to be one of my favorite authors. I have another of her books on my shelf and will make sure it doesn't take me as long to get to it as it took me to get to this one.

To learn more about Edwidge Danticat and her books, please visit the author's Facebook Page. 

Source: I pulled this book off my own TBR shelf. 

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