The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Title: The Dew Breaker

Author: Edwidge Danticat

Publication: Vintage Books (2004)

ISBN 978-1-4000-3429-1

Format: PaperBack (242 pages) $14.00 US $17.99 CAN

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Rating: 2.5

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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.

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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 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.