Good morning, BookBlog,
I'm a little late here. I had some complications in the wee hours of the night/morning. I'd been in the emergency room since 1:30 a.m. and finally left around 6 a.m. Nothing serious, just founded worries. The doctor sent me home with Naproxin. Wow, I spent 5.5 hours in an uncomfortable emergency floor to go home with Naproxin for chest pains. I really need to catch up on sleep, but I've got classes in a couple of hours.
ANYWAY, let's talk about The Dew Breaker
I stumbled upon this book during the summer. I was taking a creative writing workshop (I'm not a creative writing major) and one of the guys in my class who is a creative writing major mentioned this novel after we were done workshopping someone's piece for the day. He said the story had reminded him of a novel he read that was comprised of many short stories that could be read separately or as an entire novel, but that it was about a man who tortured people during the Haitian conflict (with Papa Doc?) and we get to know this man through the different short stories for they give a different perspective each.
So as I started reading The Dew Breaker, I kept thinking, "Okay, short stories, each a different one, but they don't really talk about the man..." So I realized that these stories were not so direct in referring to the torturer. I think I expected to read something that was written in a given account sort of way, perhaps more journalistic. But I thought it was great how each story linked to another in such a subtle way.
What did you think of the short stories and the substance within each? Some stories were more captivating than others, like The Bridal Seamstress. Did you have a favorite?
I've really not much time right now, so I'll go into a short discussion of the book for now and I'll pick up from it later. The Book of the Dead opens up with "My father is gone." My first impression was that her father had died. When the policeman shows up a few lines down, then I think that she has killed her father. The neat thing about this line is that it's a foreshadow for the symbolic loss of her father later in the story. Ka, the narrator keeps emphasizing at the beginning of the story how she has nothing in common with her parents, yet we see that this isn't necessarily true. On pages 13 and 18, she says that she's got a nervous tick and a way of talking or not talking during difficult situations that she inherited from both her parents. Is it that she doesn't want to have anything in common with her parents even though she mentions through out the novel that she wishes she did? I don't know why, but I got the feeling that she liked being different from them, even if she says other wise.
One of the things that bothered me of this story is how she didn't tell Gabrielle Fontaneau the truth from the beginning. Why did she have to go to lunch with Garielle's family and put herself through an embarrassing situation? Oh, and she seemed so passive. It was so annoying!
I'm not even going to proof read this because I really have to go. We'll continue.
