Disturbance-Loving Species [Paperback]

Peter Chilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2007

Peter Chilson’s fiction debut delivers a fascinating, heart-wrenching view of modern African culture, filtered through the lens of the West. In a novella and four short stories, Chilson, who traveled to Africa first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a freelance journalist, uses a phrase borrowed from biology to point out how our “disturbance-loving species” thrives in the most chaotic, seemingly unlivable situations. As this remarkable collection explores the experiences of Americans struggling to cope with the political and social upheaval of life in Africa and of Africans acclimating to life in the United States, Chilson captures in vivid detail the strange, exhilarating frisson between cultures.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Chilson makes a promising fiction debut with these stories about Americans and Africans who come to realize the gulf between their cultures isn't as large as it might seem (he has written a travelogue set in West Africa). In the novella Tea with Soldiers, Carter, an ex-pat teaching in Niger, mourns the disappearance of a friend and colleague and tries to reconcile himself to his powerlessness in the face of the absurdity of death—particularly that of one of his malnourished students who succumbs to malaria. The title story features a botanist's reminiscences about his dead sister, a Peace Corps worker whose work, as the narrator describes, was akin to plants that live where other plants cannot, breathing nutrients into torn-up soil so others might grow. Other stories portray the violence that plagues parts of Africa and explore the challenges of understanding and interpreting carnage. In Freelancing a journalist reflects on a photographer colleague who once asked a woman keening over a dead body to move so he could have a better angle for his shot. This affecting collection moves well beyond jaded ex-pat cliché and expertly balances the political and emotional realities of troubled people in troubled places. (Aug. 9)
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From Booklist

Chilson has spent years in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and freelance journalist. In this vivid and eye-opening collection, he explores, via characters from one continent sojourning in the other, the vast political and cultural dissimilarities between Africa and America. In one story, a West African ecologist teaching in Oregon runs into trouble with the police when he boils a goat head behind his apartment. In "Freelancing," an American journalist in West Africa is appalled by the zombielike ability of his photographer to snap endless scenes of horror. The gripping novella "Tea with Soldiers" depicts a young, idealistic grad student, David Carter, teaching English in a secondary school in Niger and struggling against suspicions that he is really with the CIA. Chilson brilliantly juxtaposes David's gradually worsening present, marked by government harassment and the beatings of his students, with his past talks with fellow teacher Salif, who has been taken away for interrogation. As Salif says about his parents' arrests and his own beatings, the story is not awful, but rather, like each of Chilson's tales, "an African story." Donovan, Deborah

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Product Details

• Paperback: 229 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (August 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618858709
• ISBN-13: 978-0618858705
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,979,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cohesive, Compelling Collection, August 16, 2007

By 

H. Marchand - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Disturbance-Loving Species (Paperback)

A collection of short stories should be like a good record album (okay, a CD; maybe I'm old). The individual stories (or songs) should be successful in their own right, and when you've experienced the whole thing you should feel that every one of them belonged and that the whole is, in itself, also a successful creation. Peter Chilson's first short fiction collection achieves this hoped-for quality and cohesiveness.

The stories themselves are compelling. Set in either West Africa or the northwestern U.S. (as the author's life has been for years), they traffic in culture clash and hard realities, and the prevailing mood is tense and often grim. ("American Food" provides a nicely modulated counterpoint as it serves up some nearly absurdist humor along with the familiar cultural tension.) Chilson's clear, unadorned narrative voice ties the collection together well, bringing to mind George Orwell's aesthetic preference for language that allows the reader to focus on the story rather than the way it is told. And these stories, tough and humane and probing in their exploration of human relationships across a cultural divide, do reward the reader's attention.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real Life in Africa, September 11, 2007

By 

Ms. Linda Miilu "Chris" - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Disturbance-Loving Species (Paperback)

This book is really the story of a life in Africa - a foreigner's life, and the lives of those he meets and learns from. I couldn't put it down.