The Dew Breaker.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat Knopf, March 2004 $22.00, ISBN 1-400-04114-7

Edwidge Danticat's latest work of fiction is full of dark secrets. Some of the secrets belong to people who have committed unspeakable acts of violence. Other secrets belong to the victims of those acts. The secrets are closely guarded by their Haitian owners, but like most secrets, they are eventually revealed by the overburdened consciences of the torturers and the wounded psyches of the tortured.

In the nine interrelated short stories in The Dew Breaker, the secrets come out slowly, sometimes helped along by strong Haitian rum.

There is the unnamed torturer, the Dew Breaker, so named because he shows up to dispatch opponents of the Haitian government at dawn before the morning dew has dried. He now lives in Brooklyn and must tell his American-born daughter the truth about his past in Haiti. Once a heartless sadist who worked with ruthless efficiency, he lives with a constant guilt and self loathing despite the redemptive love of his family.

In his new country, he has remade himself into a kindly landlord and barber, living a private, modest life revolving solely around his barbershop and his small family. He struggles to feel worthy of the love given him by a wife, who knows about his past and, and a daughter who does not.

The book could easily be mistaken for a novel because the Dew Breaker is present in every story, either in person or in the memories of the other characters. One woman, a wedding dressmaker whose sanity is uncertain, is convinced that her former torturer lives in her Brooklyn neighborhood and is watching her. She believes that he follows her, relocating to every new neighborhood to which she moves.

Many of Danticat's characters are storytellers themselves. They quote proverbs when they speak of their joys and aspirations or when they share their grief and regrets. Her spare, lyrical prose is ever present in the gentle telling of stories that are soft to the ear even when pain and violence seem to scream from the pages.

"He liked questioning the prisoners, teaching them to play zo and bezik, stapling clothespins to their ears as they lost and removing them as he let them win, convincing them that their false victories would save their lives." she writes of the Dew Breaker. "He liked to paddle them with braided cowhide, stand on their cracking backs and jump up and down, like a drunk on a trampoline, pound a rock on the protruding bone behind their earlobes until they couldn't hear the orders he was shouting at them.