The Year of The Hare $14.70 $14.70

Review by Jennifer Ciotta

When it comes to having great knowledge about contemporary literature of Finland, most of us fall short.  We cannot name one work by a Finnish author, living or dead, much less be able to pronounce the daunting language of our Nordic brethren.  Places such as Lapland, Turku, Sompio or even Helsinki conjure images of a documentary once seen on the Travel Channel years before.

Arto Paasilinna, however, proves this Finland continues to exist in his contemporary novel The Year of the Hare, published in 1995 by Peter Owen and translated into English by Herbert Lomas.  The book won accolades as a bestseller in both Finland and France, and gained the distinguished honor of being amongst the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, which was founded in 1948 to promote the international translation, publication and distribution of national works that are representative of a country's literature and culture. Paasilinna writes from experience, since he was born in 1942 in Finland's Lapland, the most northern area of Europe, commonly known to outsiders for its most famous inhabitant, Santa Claus.  Lapland, or Lappi (as in Finnish), encompasses the northern parts, around or above the Arctic Circle, of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.  It is here that the Sami, or Native people, dwell along with wild reindeer and the spectacular Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis.

The Year of the Hare follows a journalist and a hare through the many seasons and towns in Finland, most notably setting the last remainder of the book in Lapland, among the bitter winter freeze.  The journalist named Vatanen escapes the mundane and vacuous life of Helsinki as he runs after a hare who has been hit by the car of Vatanen's colleague, a photographer.  As a passenger, Vatanen leaps out of the car, and scampers into the forest after the injured hare. Left in the woods by the photographer, Vatanen sets off on a year filled with mischievous and insightful adventures while caring for the wild creature.  He tosses away married life, his job and even sells his beloved boat for easy cash in his pocket.  Along the way, he survives by living and sleeping amongst nature--providing stunning details of the enigmatic Finnish countryside.  Paasilinna's writing flows into a series of descriptive, environmental episodes for which the book has been recognized as an ecological novel. For example, the author simulates a forest fire:

It was a fairyland.  Blazing trees illuminated the night on both sides of the brook -- huge red fluttering flowers.  The heat was so scorching that while the fire lasted they had to stand in the brook: only their heads baked in the blazing glow.  They had the vat of moonshine with them in the brook and tasted it liberally, watching with keen interest the destructive show of this wild natural superstar.

Perhaps the most exhilarating scenes of the novel stem from Paasilinna's ability to take the reader, uninterrupted, into Vatanen's mind and actions.  The audience feels the sereneness of Lapland with Vatanen through his lovely days spent with a milkmaid, felling trees in the forest and stroking the hare tenderly.  Conversely, Lapland tends to be a frustrating and dangerous place for the protagonist, not necessarily for the surroundings, but for the people and animals who invade his privacy.  In this natural world, he finds himself irked by a raven with no manners, and takes off on a bear-hunt from Finland to Russia (then the Soviet Union), all the while on skis, and to the amusement of the Russian government, watching from a helicopter above. 

Paasilinna taps into the stereotypical Finn as Vatanen produces little to no reaction to extraordinary circumstances, such as calmly invading an official, ministry dinner or quietly being thrown in jail for no reason at all--twice.  From beginning to end, Vatanen never loses his humor nor cynicism for his homeland, and also his cunning ability to escape the narrowest of fate.