Disturbance-Loving Species

by Peter Chilson

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618858709
• ISBN13: 9780618858705
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Real Life in Africa

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.

A Cohesive, Compelling Collection

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.