Turn of the Century

To those who crave the cosmopolitanism of cities, life in the remote Alberta foothills with their harsh, endless winters may seem a punishing seclusion. But distance from urban preoccupations can attune human sensitivities to natural and emotional landscapes. In Anik See’s Cabin Fever, an expansive wilderness lends itself to prolonged contemplation. See’s sparse language infuses a simple story — told across four years and through devastating personal and world events — with haunting moments of discovery and abandon.

To escape an unnamed western Canadian city’s frenzy on the last day of the previous millennium, the narrator, Clea Barnes, snowshoes to a nearby forest. She camps in a small clearing where there is “nothing to count down to. There was barely a breeze, hardly a noise.” On New Year’s Day, she hitchhikes to the rural cabin her parents built on 200 acres of “uncluttered” land in the 1960s. There she discovers relics of her late parents untouched by time: her father’s chair by the stove overlooking the valley, her mother’s discarded vase half-buried in the grass, and a game of solitaire, undisturbed, on the table. It seems almost “as though someone’s been waiting.”

But much has changed since her last visit a decade earlier. Her parents were killed suddenly in a head‑on collision. Gerry, a neighbour whom she has known since childhood, now lives alone. His children have moved away, unnerved by the prospect of staying where there “ain’t nothin’ but nothin.’ ” Shuttered storefronts and broken, papered windows now pepper the local village’s central strip. Max, a close friend and a Dutch bookbinder, grieves his recent separation from his wife, who became “too frustrated by the isolation she found here.” To Clea, this part of the country now seems “more like something out of a time no longer realistically reclaimable, a place lost in its past, though it can come off as faux, even when it’s being real.”

Anxieties within the community speak to an ongoing tension between urban and rural spaces. From a cabin “about the size of Thoreau’s,” Clea considers the myths around those who withstand cultural and technological change. See resists the urge to reduce them to a tidy fiction. Thinking of Gerry reminds Clea of something she heard a French farmer say about his relationship to society: “Je ne suis pas folklore, he said. Je suis dans ma vie.” (I am not folklore. I am in my life.)

As months turn to years, Clea’s appreciation for time away from the city grows. “My father told me we see clearly when there’s less to look at, less to hear,” she recalls. She and Max spend many evenings reminiscing about his formative years in the Netherlands — his apprenticeship at the bindery, visits to an old wharf, afternoons spent by the sea — and how expanding industries brought about the “sudden insignificance” of other trades. Along Amsterdam’s waterfront, warehouses and foundries were transformed “into expensively-priced lofts.” Similarly, Clea remembers visiting Cologne, Germany, where people, trains, cars, and bridges overwhelmed a small block behind its famous Gothic cathedral. Despite all the progressive endeavours in the world, she “couldn’t help but think we keep building on top of ourselves, despite ourselves, despite the glory in front of us.”

Local and international incidents provide a backdrop to the meandering narrative: Clea avoids the Y2K panic, the Twin Towers fall on 9/11, Gerry dies tragically while cutting down a tree, and two convicts from the area are released from prison. Abstract memories, dreams, and conversations unite these disparate plot lines, creating a cohesive whole that is neither myopic nor overly ambitious.

From sprawling Dutch suburbs to the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, See’s terrain is as alive as her characters: complicated, resilient, and ever changing. In Cabin Fever, grief is as much about the loss of place as it is about the loss of an identity once tethered to a country, home, or family that no longer exists. In a poignant chapter, Max proposes that everyone is just looking for their metaphorical querencia, a Spanish word used to describe the space where injured bulls can recover during a fight. For him, it is the North Sea coast: “a place in which you feel or know precisely who you are, to which you’ve always belonged, even though you may never have been there before.”

A thoughtful meditation on belonging and the cost of human change, Cabin Fever is a complete, affecting novel. Devastating sentences and observations abound, alongside uncaptioned black and white pictures of landscapes and architecture — a nod to W. G. Sebald, who is quoted throughout. See opens the second half of her novel with a passage from his final book, Austerlitz: “The world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.” Her quiet incisiveness attempts to remedy this loss. In creating a record of time passing, See illustrates the way mundane moments profoundly alter our lives.