Anik See's ​Cabin Fever

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2024)

Halloween morning in Ottawa was unusually balmy. I chose to finish reading Cabin Fever at one of my favourite cafés, the Art House Café, on the patio. I immersed myself in the final chapters in the bustle of Somerset Street as garbage trucks and fire trucks went by with loud honks and sirens blazing. I realized that I was reading what I refer to as a “foundational book,” a book so necessary to my life that I would read it again. I would read it when I was gripped by how absurd and random the world can be, how violent and cruel. In Cabin Fever, Anik See portrays the senselessness and cruelty of our time, while also showing us hope.
 
The book takes place between January 2000 and late winter, 2002. The protagonist is Clea Barnes, a woman whose parents died several years ago in a car accident. On the eve of the new millennium, she decides to spend time at the family cottage. There are so many nested stories and digressions within this book, and it is a joy to read them.  
 
When I began reading the novel, autumn had just begun. I had to grow accustomed to the early onset of darkness and cool nights. It was the perfect time to settle into this thick, pocket-sized novel.
 
The prologue begins on the eve of the new millennium when the possibilities of Y2K disasters are causing fear. The protagonist chooses to camp in the woods in the snow where the howling of wolves comes closer until they are right outside the tarp. It is a compelling beginning.
 
Note that we have no indication about the name or gender of the protagonist at this point. No clue about her life, other than the facts that she went to university to study translation and that her parents died together many years ago in a car accident. Since then, the main character has learned to make lists as a way of countering the randomness of life. We are not told until much later in the novel (Fall 2000, Part 2) that her name is Clea Barnes.
 
In the body of the novel, we jump back to the 1960s, when the protagonist's parents bought land and built a cabin. 194 acres of land seem unimaginable to me, a city girl, as something a regular person, not a corporation, could purchase.
 
Right away and throughout the narrative, the novel presents two conflicting portraits of vastness: nature (peaceful and enduring humility) as represented in references to Arcadia (harmony with nature/Utopia) vs industry (horror-based awe and ephemerality). Industry intrudes upon nature often, such as the twisted metal rusted-out strips from mining as Max and Clea walk in the forest, or the pornography Max encounters while skiing.
 
The book is laced with quoteworthy contemplations of life, our place in the world, the importance of nature and its endurance over the fleetingness of things, the strength of that which has been built to last, often handcrafted, over what is meant to be consumed and forgotten, things wrought from capitalism and industry.
 
Some of the old, enduring objects in the book include a xylothek, a book made out of a tree, an incunabulum, which is a book printed in the earliest stages of printing in the fifteenth century, a Chinese coin with a square hole in it that Clea carries in her pocket, given to her by her friend Max, who carries it around to remind him of things that don’t make sense.
 
It is no surprise that Clea carries a watch in her backpack, for example. She’s not wearing time around her wrist, she’s put it aside, for when she needs it. 
 
“They say a house comes into its own when the weather gets rough: a house under siege from water, wind, snow, ice, becomes a poetry, the very thing that confirms your place in this world, despite what the world throws at you.” I take refuge in the book as I grieve the loss of a dear friend and am confronted with the anxieties of pending doom I feel in the world, and my own personal anxieties.
 
Literature is quoted often in this book. One of the key quotations is by Tom Stoppard from Arcadia: "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm…” Clea adds, “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Clea must feel this way, given the loss of her parents in a car accident. How can the world make sense at all? It’s a question many of us are asking.
 
Small black-and-white photographs throughout give the impression of a true story and take us out of fiction, and to some extent the work feels like a documentary about survival and being away from the city, about finding refuge and seeking solitude. There are also illustrations. These photographs and illustrations are uncredited.
 
Max, the main character’s friend, lives on the other side of the hamlet. He is a Dutch bookmaker, who keeps only what he enjoys and what he needs for his work. His description of witnessing an apartment’s contents being removed after the abandonment of a tenant is a reminder of the uselessness and unimportance of things, of possession.
 
There are beautiful descriptions in this book: of sounds, of weather, of landscapes and light, of textures, of old, sixteenth-century books with hand-coloured drawings. The descriptions contribute to the delight of a slow read and give the impression of a preference for that which endures or is timeless over the fleeting and the commercial.
 
The novel feels like a tabula rasa in many ways; it’s the start of a new millennium and Clea is spending time in an isolated cabin, surrounded by nothing but snow, and the occasional neighbour who drops by. It feels very blank and still. As if we are waiting for something to happen or nothing. It’s too soon to tell.
 
We learn everything from Clea’s point of view in first-person. She describes her first meeting with Max, a neighbour. Note that Max is also the preferred name of W.G. Sebald, a writer whose work figures prominently in the book. Is See paying homage to Sebald’s writing through her portrayal of the neighbour, Max? Only a reader familiar with Sebald’s work can tell. Alas that reader is not me…yet.
 
Max is a typesetter and a bookmaker. The description of his love of type is reason enough for book lovers to read Cabin Fever. He didn’t want to be involved with creating new things. He wanted to preserve the old. He was “fascinated with wreckage and salvage, deterioration and restoration, because I was fascinated with what we are willing to give up for something new or better…And what outlasts us, despite our best efforts—even the most fragile things. The things we are left with.”
 
Gerry, a neighbour, is a faller, someone who looks for fallen trees. He saves old nails, doesn’t throw things away, and is yet another person who believes in keeping things simple. When I think of the turn of the twenty-first century, I think about how things were not simple. We were about to experience 9/11, then the rise of Internet propaganda and hate, the smart phone, the American election of a reality tv host with delusions of empire, the increasing racism and misogyny, climate disaster, refuges fleeing for their lives, the genocide in Gaza. A deluge of complexities and fears. As I am reading the book and writing this review, we are days away from an American election that could see riots or the end of democracy or who knows what.
 
Clea tells Gerry about an English baronet who sells everything but his plane and a landing strip. This book hammers the point home: what matters isn’t possessions. Clea makes coffee for Gerry on an old-fashioned and uncomplicated espresso maker, after he disturbs a dream she is having of their mother on a sailboat and a man in an attic who is still and fades from view. There are many dreams in the book and several feature disappearance, engulfment and oblivion as she navigates the terrain of her own grief.
 
Over coffee, Gerry lets Clea know that his wife Vera has died. This book is full of those who have lost loved ones. It’s a wilderness of grief.
 
Max teaches Clea the Spanish word querencia: “a place in which you feel or know precisely who you are, to which you’ve always belonged, even though you have never been there before.”
 
The section entitled September 2001 opens with an epigraph from W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants which describes Munich, still ravaged by war, the heaps of rubble and fire-scorched buildings. I found myself thinking not just of World War II and 9/11, but also of the war in Gaza, and in Ukraine, all the images of bombed buildings, dead children. The horrors of war still enduring. See quotes Anselm Kiefer, “Rubble is the future.” Clea thinks of a Japanese shogun who built a bridge out of sugar, knowing it wouldn’t last, and, gleefully perhaps, watched it dissolve.
 
When Clea is contemplating living full-time in the cabin as a place of refuge, 9/11 happens. Clea’s description of seeing the buildings fall on television as something that wasn’t real at first, is very much what I felt when watching it happen.
 
On the way back to the cabin, Clea doesn’t find comfort in the landscape, but finds it empty. She sees a dead cat, echoing an earlier discovery of a dead baby in a coffin. While looking at the iconic photo from 9/11, a man falling to Earth from the tower, she tells someone about the Japanese word setsunai, a kind of beauty that contains aspects of pain and melancholy. “That photo asks (but doesn’t answer) not only what, but why?”
 
There are many surprises in this book, one of which is how Clea handles the potential of violence as men who robbed the town are still at large and encroach on her space. She helps one of them, after he is caught hanging around a gallery. He is violently stopped by security guards and held against a plate glass window. The patrons in the gallery go about their business as if this violence is normal. Clea realizes that it is Stevie Cullum, one of the bank robbers Eustace, the store owner, had told her about, kids who did things without seeing harm, who had done two years’ probation and were now out. She had seen them both, one at the sand pit and the other in her home, carrying rifles. She’d been scared, but here she helps Stevie out, intercedes on his behalf after he has been held for twenty minutes, but hasn’t really done anything wrong, and offers to take him away. The security guards let her. Taking his ​hand reminds Clea of reaching for her parents’ hands during the car accident:

​“I held my hand out to Stevie to help him up, and an image flashed in my mind, of the impossible, of taking the hands of my parents, crushed to death by an 18-wheeler, pinned in their car, and pulling them out, bringing them back to life.”

I love the way See weaves art with anguish together throughout the book, from the abandoned shipbuilding dockyard that had been taken over by an artist’s collective and then taken over by skateboarders, weeds and graffiti, its echo hollow and “ominously desperate”; the visual artist who transcribes the words of immigrants “without economic status” in a small European village: “I’m waiting for the day I can see my children again.”
 
So much beauty in this novel: the uncountable shades of green on Clea and her parents’ trip to Venice, the appearance of the coffin.
 
As Max says toward the end of the book, querencia is a romantic thought, but not practical. The world encroaches, violence happens, and our sense of an ideal place changes, too. “Are we supposed to change with it, or head off into the wild blue yonder in search on a new one? As romantics, probably. But practically? I’m not sure.”
 
One of my favourite stories Clea tells is about Johnny Cash’s appearance at Folsom Prison, after his return to music after years of self-destruction. Just before he is about to sing to the audience of inmates, he asks for a glass of water. He holds it up to the light and it is yellow and cloudy.  The crowd cheers. He throws the glass to the stage, where it smashes, and begins to sing “Folsom Prison Blues.” “The smash of the glass, the defiance and intensity of it and yet its grace, how his eyes flashed as he did it, how he performed the song with its shards at his feet, that resonated more than anything else this day.”
 
If you are grieving, if you are as perplexed and anxious about the times we are in, I offer you this book as witness, as complicated feelings of wanting escape from the madness, but thinking you have to take it on, help in some way, mix.  There are no easy answers. We are fleeting, we will disappear, but nature lives on.

​“When faced with pain, all I can think of is beauty, and that scares me too, that reaction, though it’s comforting as well. It scares me because of how comforting it is.”
 
“Good books are made with eventual repair in mind.”
 
“Salvation from trauma comes in the most unexpected thing.”
 
“You are born alone and you die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”

​Clea thinks about “Goethe on his deathbed, asking for more light.”
 
The echo is the thing that matters most.

---

Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, reviews and publishes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. She is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection provoked by her near-death health crisis. Amanda offers an editing and mentorship service. Visit TinyUrl.com/AmandaEarlEdits for more information, and subscribe to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for whimsy, exploration and a feeling of connection with kindred misfits.