Diane Awerbuck, Cabin Fever. Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011

Four days after 32-year-old Anders Breivik became a household name, author Diane Awerbuck published an online editorial devoted to this “empty-hearted son of a bitch”, whose killing spree left 77 people dead. Awerbuck’s speculation that the Norwegian massacre would prompt “more verbosity, more pompousness, more bombast” was both accurate and self-evident. Whatever the misery – Hokusai’s great wave consuming an island state, an intransigent North African leader quoting from his green book to a television audience, a white supremacist in a wetsuit – one can count on talking heads to offer a surfeit of endless opinion. It is rarely edifying.

For all its limitations, Awerbuck’s think piece is nonetheless worth reading. It re-emphasises the inherent lack in all the brisk editorialising out there (that amorphous species of writing that proffers qualified opinion in reaction to a newsworthy event) compared with well-honed fiction, which by its nature is slow in the making and always late. Awerbuck is okay at the former, at chattily delivering informed comment, but it is as a fiction writer that she really excels. Cabin Fever, her new collection of short stories, demonstrates her remarkable talent for marshalling ideas and words into sentences that flare and illuminate, often way beyond the capacities of journalism.

Cabin Fever includes a gripping story, “Extra Lesson”, the premise of which is the stuff of breaking news. Two schoolboys, one of them fat and named Kenny, enter an all-girls school with a knife and violent intent.

“It’s Valentine’s Day,” explains one boy. “We’re making a delivery.” The tragic arc of the story unfolds in the school library and is narrated by an unnamed female teacher. Awerbuck’s attentiveness to ordinary speech (“Check, Miss!”) and setting (“STUDENTS who DAMAGE BOOKS will be FINED!” reads a notice) lend this psychological story texture and credibility. This is somewhere real and knowable, the details tell you. Kenny is not the ringleader, we soon learn; he is too literate, obsequious, undecided. Not so his accomplice. “We can do whatever we want,” says this “thin boy” with wolfish looks. “He was emaciated, graceless, a spare coat-hanger of a boy,” observers the teacher-narrator, whose first-hand view of the fatal stabbing places the reader in the midst of the action. Proximity is a form of partiality; we don’t really learn the motives that compel the wolf in a school blazer.

Shortly before a “hot slaughterhouse smell” fills the library, this feral boy shows the teacher one of his tattoos. “I AM NOT WHAT I AM.” Othello, clarifies Kenny. In a collection that excavates and ennobles white-slacker torpor and middle-class ennui – Awerbuck is a kind of poet laureate of the hangover, both drug- and love-induced – “Extra Lesson” emerges as one of Cabin Fever’s standout fictions. Suffused with a rich sense of place, Cape Town, and its ordinary vernacular, the story is a jolting narrative about the probable, and the inexplicable. Fiction here is more than simply a way of telling. It is, as Richard Ford reminded audiences during his 2008 visit to Franschhoek, a radical act of the imagination, “the afterlife of what journalism can achieve”.

“Extra Lesson” encapsulates Awerbuck’s basic inclination as a writer, which is to reach beyond the husk of journalistic fact in explicating trauma (a sub-theme of her forthcoming book, The Spirit and the Letter: Trauma, Warblogs and the Public Sphere, based on her doctoral thesis). Cabin Fever is fully immersed in the lovelessness of contemporary South Africa, where stabbings, robberies, race-hate crimes, suicides and drugged self-immolations have a banal currency. Awerbuck is interested in these things, she reads about them in the news, albeit with authorial intent. Here’s Awerbuck again from her recent online editorial: “Until we live in a time that we understand – not intellectually, but instinctively – what it is really like to be in someone else’s shoes, the trajectory of the psycho, with his broken family and his grudge against some random group and his moneyed access to high-grade weaponry, will continue.”

It is possible to collapse this statement of purpose into a single word: empathy. Awerbuck’s transparently realist fictions are rooted in the kind of humanist sensitivity one has come to associate with Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who Jonathan Franzen once praised as a “remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences”.¹ Awerbuck is not always a remote narrator. One senses the outlines of her biography as a Kimberley-born former schoolteacher refracted and repeating itself in many of her stories: in “Splodge Gets Married”, a somewhat whimsical narrative about a group of men skinny-dipping in a Kimberley school pool the night before a wedding; again in “School Photos”, a powerful if not fully realised story about “the clichés of beating”.

The latter story, which might better have served as the collection’s title, is about an enquiring Cape Town schoolteacher, Mister September, a man haunted by the memory of “my Bushman forebears”. He sees the “girls with bruises” in his class, asks them where they are from. “They looked down at the dead garden of the linoleum, searching for clues,” offers September, whose description allows featureless state architecture its own fatal beauty. Eventually he manages to get a student to let him photograph her bruises, a kind of violence sensitively described by Awerbuck. These photos, evidence in waiting, languish; the student graduates, goes to university – the photos are eventually torn up and thrown away. But it’s not the evidence that matters, insists September: “It’s the living with it” – the memory of the bruises.

The seedbed of experience is a good starting point for any writer, but it is the ability to repurpose and transgress biography that, for me, distinguishes rewarding fiction. Cabin Fever sees Awerbuck imaginatively render the details of other lives. “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” is the most striking example of the author sloughing off the skin of self. This magical story, its titled borrowed from a 1986 song by The Smiths, sees Awerbuck inhabit the persona of a Holocaust survivor, an elderly British Jew named Thomas Heber. Heber is a former soldier whose war journals bring him literary acclaim long after the fact. This story of a man “caught between the guilt of describing extinction and repaying the debt of survival” details Thomas’s trip to a “dim” ossuary in Kotna Hora, in the Czech Republic. It is atypical in some senses, the story’s dissonance in characterisation and geographic setting hinting at other possibilities in Awerbuck’s writing. But in other respects, Thomas, who speaks little but thinks a lot, is little different to many of the fictional characters that populate Cabin Fever, whose verbal restraint belies the intensity of their private thoughts and rationalisations.

“So many people with their hidden histories, their burns and scars and shortfalls, and all of them detained here together.” This is Jurie, a financially troubled farmer dressed in “hardy, faded camouflage from Cape Union Mart” describing the passengers on a train as he heads for a meeting with the loans manager at the Standard Bank in Adderley Street. Jurie is self-entitled and angry with “you people” – he remembers only “his old life, his small voice, the past”. But this passage, from Awerbuck’s story “Loxion Kulca”, offers more than just a description of Jurie’s fellow train passengers: it is a functional synopsis of the accumulated characters made visible in Awerbuck’s elegiac collection.

The overriding tone of Cabin Fever is melancholic, Awerbuck’s introspective stories marked by sadness and hurt, at love’s betrayal, at the immensity of a historical past whose brutality and violence and naming is proximate and now. The title story autopsies the painful dissolution of a relationship, that “slow journey” from love to its aftermath. Saul and Karina live in Fish Hoek, “where everybody was learning to smoke, or had once been a smoker: people in various shadowy stages of withdrawal wandered the streets”. Saul, however, has moved from marijuana to cocaine, his demeanour that of a “taxidermist’s model”.

The story unfolds while Saul languishes sullenly in a Kommetjie rehab. Karina, who is pregnant and quietly aware that her unborn child is floating around in a “chemical bath of constant sadness”, decides to find and destroy Saul’s large stash of hydroponically grown weed. At first she tries to flush it away, but the “sodden Amazon forest” won’t disappear, so she decides to burn it. Between these two events, which open and close the story, a whole history of hurt is narrated. Like the collection’s clipped opening story, “Mami Wata”, “Cabin Fever” is a perfect exemplar of Awerbuck’s skill at unbundling and surfacing the anxieties and excesses of Cape Town’s de facto elite, whities who inhabit a world with “a precarious hold on the continent”, to quote Thomas Pynchon, “the sea at their backs”.²

Water, swimming pools, beaches and endless horizons of wet recur throughout Awerbuck’s collection. The opening story offers a gorgeous description of a couple’s final swim together in the Coke-coloured water of a river near Hermanus. The calm is disturbed by the fleeting appearance of the water deity, Mami Wata, and not long afterwards by the utterance of a single, unanswered, ominous line of speech within a relationship: “We should see other people.” Cabin Fever closes with another story of skinny-dipping. A subtly narrated story, “Phosphorescence” details the awkward rapprochement that happens between Alice and her suicidal granddaughter, Brittany, after grandma sheds the “sealskin” of her bathing costume and swims naked. Brittany joins her. Then the wrecking crew arrive, literally; the rock pool’s days were numbered from the outset, the “squatting” bulldozers moving off the “stretches of dead yellow grass under their bellies”. A fully contained work, “Phosphorescence” nonetheless gestures towards other things, events, lives and possibilities. Which is as it should be. The short form is a story told in fractions. Whole numbers are redundant, or at least better deployed in novels. Awerbuck’s ambitious if uneven debut collection of stories, the follow-up to her 2004 novel Gardening at Midnight, bears this out, the best of her writing here leaving you feeling like the naked Alice fleeing the demolition of Graaf’s Pool, excited, unsure, just possibly renewed.

Works Cited

1. Franzen, Jonathan, “What makes you so sure you’re not the evil one yourself?”, published as an Introduction to Alice Munro’s volume of stories, Runaway (London: Vintage, 2005), about which Franzen is full of praise. Franzen’s essay, which first appeared in the New York Times Book Review, is due to be republished as Farther Away: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012).
2. Pynchon, Thomas, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1997).