Anik See, Cabin Fever
"... the past has a more powerful presence than the present, as much as we try to deny it." (p244)
Almost anyone who's visited this blog before (or even just talked to me about books) knows that I'm a supporter of Fish Gotta Swim Editions, the small novella-centric press founded and operated by Theresa Kishkan and Anik See. The wonderful catalogue for Fish Gotta Swim began in 2016 with Kishkan's own Winter Wren, a book that I ended up ordering about 10 of to give away. After several other titles, Anik See has now joined the catalogue as well by authoring the press's longest novella--or perhaps first novel. Whatever its genre, I couldn't be more delighted to finally get to read Cabin Fever (even if it does mean I'll have to buy several more copies!).
The origin story, aesthetics, and ethics for Fish Gotta Swim are laid out best in a short interview on the blog for Stilt Book Cradles. In this interview, See offers a comment on design that might well be the entire subtext of Cabin Fever:
"I think we often forget in these times of overwhelming information and raw content that a lot of the craft in writing and design is about removing distraction, of paring things to their core."
There aren't any loose ends in Cabin Fever, and there aren't many characters across its 250 pages (which are small, too, with plenty of white space). The prose is tight and spare, too, without even quotation marks, so you're left without distractions. Everything deserves attention, requires attention, so it's a not a book for casual reading. If you'll give it the attention it deserves, though, you'll find yourself richly satisfied by what you find here.
This is a book about memory and loss, or more specifically about the irreplaceable people and places and things that get lost along the way toward building whatever life we may end up with. At heart, Cabin Fever takes place in the open space between a line from W.G. Sebald that serves as an epigraph for one of the sections, and the story that Max, a specialist in restoring ancient books, tells about how he came to his career:
Sebald: "the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on" (p113)
Max: "I was fascinated with wreckage and salvage, deterioration and restoration, because I was fascinated with what we're willing to give up, lose or destroy for something new, or something 'better'.... And what outlasts us, despite our best efforts--even the most fragile things. What we're left with" (p142)
The novel's set in the Alberta foothills across a few years at the turn of the millennium, mostly, with a few detours in both place and time. Still, it's not a work of near-past historical fiction, because although its chosen time matters enormously for the novel's thematics, as does its chosen setting, See and her characters deliberately face up to the passage of time in space, by which I mean both their own histories and the book's (and our own) future, wherever we readers might find ourselves.
Given that the 2020s could well be defined by acceleration and by the accumulation of crises, this relatively timeless theme holds a great deal of weight in the current moment. We're losing an awful lot, including through COVID, and we're at risk of losing so much more. (Last night was the Biden/Trump debate ["debate"], to cite just one example of this historic moment's catastrophic risks.)
As a result, I found myself a bit overwhelmed at times by how intensely this book presents the value of memory and the impact of loss, especially in how it recaptures particular feelings around the temporal hinges that were Y2K and 9/11. Those of us old enough to have lived through those epochal moments will see versions of ourselves in Cabin Fever, so maybe it'll read more piercingly for us, but certainly age is no precondition for appreciating the novel.
Now, one reason for my delight at getting to read Cabin Fever is simply that this book has been coming for a very, very long time. Fully ten years ago now, in 2014, when Anik See wrote a wee essay on writing for Rob Maclennan's Ottawa Poetry Newsletter blog, her author bio included this remark: "Her fourth book, Cabin Fever, is forthcoming." There's a long story, I'm certain, behind why it has taken a decade for "forthcoming" to become "in print, from the press I co-founded." Publishing is a strange game, especially in Canada, as I've written many times in these pages (most recently about Wolsak & Wynn's publication of Tim Bowling's Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird). Maybe there's someone out there whom I should resent for refusing to share this book with the world, but at least it's here now.
But life's complicated, so who knows?
While we've been awaiting Cabin Fever, See has developed a complicatedly multi-track career (journalism, documentary work, teaching, design, and so on), and it may just be that it has simply never been the right time. In any case, I'm struck by what feels in Cabin Fever like a rich, sophisticated, mature approach both to fiction and to the question of meaning. It's hard to know whether the new book benefits from being an aggregation of all these more recent experiences, or whether this richness was in place when the book was first drafted 10+ years ago, but this is exceptional work by a mature artist.
Maybe that's because See drafts in longhand, as Tim Bowling said of his own process in writing Marvels of Youth, another recent Canadian novel about memory that has been much on my mind. I'm very much an advocate for handwriting, no matter how messy it might be (ie, NOT penmanship!), so I'm a sucker for that claim. Both writers are only a little older than me, too, and I've been reading them both for a very long time (Bowling for 30 years, and See for 15), so I was already ready to climb on board. In his essay "On Handwriting and Nationhood," Bowling admits that there's little evidence that literacy levels increase with the use of a pen or decrease with the use of a keyboard, but regardless, he goes on to insist on anecdote: "I feel the difference between writing by hand and typing. The past comes alive for me in more surprising and detailed ways when I use cursive, as if each sweeping stroke is like the waving of a tiny magic wand" (pp31-32).
See has said much the same thing, though in her case the focus is more on commitment: "Writing longhand – putting pen to paper, indelible ink, means I’d better be writing something worthwhile. There’s no ‘delete’ key that can cheerfully erase any evidence of words hastily put down. I can still experiment on paper and cross something out if I don’t like it, but it’ll still be there (which comes in handy sometimes) as evidence of struggle, and sometimes triumph" (Ottawa Poetry).
Their prose styles, and thus the effects of their handwriting, are dissimilar to the extreme, but in both cases, there's something of the handwritten text. Bowling's style is overstuffed, rife with apposition and periodic sentences, while See's is spare, almost imagist at times. Although Bowling's the poet, which means reviewers do tend to label his prose "poetic," in fact See's makes the reader do more work to imagine the scenes, characters, motivations, and so on. There's a narrative to Cabin Fever, but its narrative proceeds through scenes, details, moments. If Bowling's drafting in longhand, filling his pages from margin to margin with paragraphs, then maybe See's writing notes, fragments, so that it feels a little like a commonplace book might. Cabin Fever is studded with images, too, most of them closely connected to the text but none of them directly commented upon, much like a commonplace book might have.
And See's book is intensely readerly, too, in the best possible way. It's full of quotations and references, with one of the characters (as noted above) a professional restorer of ancient books. The more time you spend with Cabin Fever, the more you see the recurrence and repetition of various lines and scenes. Halfway through the book, Clea remembers being in a cave with her father, when she was young, and when her father sees her beginning to feel claustrophobic, he tells her to shout or sing, to generate an echo that'll ground her: "the echo ... the echo is the thing that matters most" (p132, italics in original).
Remember Sebald's remark about objects that can't remember or speak for themselves, and Max's about what outlasts us? All manner of echoes and repetitions appear in this book, many of them having to do with quotations. We get Edna St. Vincent Millay on the River Lethe on pages 68 and 226; Wallace Stegner comments on the prairie sky on pages 179 and 257; the French phrase "La nuit etait opaque" on page 197 shows up in English on page 226; "Odd how things unearth themselves like that, over time," describes the re-emergence of a bone on page 123, and of a vase on page 227; a line from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia appears on pages 111 and 224.
Loss is never far away in Cabin Fever, sometimes sudden and sometimes inevitable, but always materially permanent, and Clea's surrounded by loss, relentlessly marked by it. These reappearances and echoes, though, can make loss into something that can be accommodated, accepted. As usual at Book Addiction HQ, I don't want to share very much of this book's plot, because readers should be allowed to be surprised. But let me just say that things lost can't speak for themselves, and neither can people after they've gone; this book does a beautiful job of reflecting on how those who live on after such losses are forever marked by the shapes of those lost people and things.
The older I get, the more attuned I am to loss, and to the afterlives of lost things and people. Cabin Fever has meant a great deal to me, as I keep trying to process some losses that have already occurred, and some that appear to be coming down the track: it's a stunning novel, vastly larger than the canvas that it might seem like it's confined to.
It pains me that I haven't done this book justice in these notes, but for complicated reasons, I'm not sure that it's in me right now to do that. Still, I want to make sure that there's open praise in the world for Anik See, Fish Gotta Swim Editions, and Cabin Fever, so I'm going to give up and hit "Publish." This is one of those rare books where I'm already kind of scheming a second post, too, so who knows?
In any case, my copy of Cabin Fever is already deeply scarred by pencil markings, dog-ears, and spine creases. This brief, intense novel has affected me greatly, and I think it'll have the same impact on a great many other readers, too. I'm hearing that Cabin Fever has already gone into a second printing, which heartens me enormously, and I hope that you order one yourself. If you don't like it, and you don't see what I've seen in this novel, reach out, and maybe I'll buy it from you!
(P.S. -- Although I want everyone to pick up Cabin Fever, I'd also insist that more of you need to read See's 2009 story collection Postcard and Other Stories, nor her 2008 nonfiction book Saudade: The Possibilities of Place. You need to read them both. If Cabin Fever was forthcoming in 2014 but remains timely on its 2024 publication, it's not too late for books published a mere five years before it may have been completed!)
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