The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (translated by Herbert Lomas) was originally published in Finland in 1975. Fennophile that I am, I had never heard of this novel and because of its age might very well not have been on display among new fiction whenever I popped into Finnish bookstores. When I used to work at the library this book came across the returns desk and I recognized immediately that the author’s name was Finnish. I knew one day that I would read it. At only 194 pages, it only took me two days, but I could have easily finished it all in a single sitting, since I only read 28 pages on the first day.
My praise to the translator Herbert Lomas as he was responsible for making the read so enjoyable. Lomas wrote short and funny sentences which leads me to believe that the Finnish original was likely written in the same way. If I ever see Jäniksen vuosi I will pick it up and take a look. Lomas definitely Americanized the text, converting monetary units to dollars and weights and measures to pounds and miles.
The protagonist is Kaarlo Vatanen, a journalist out on assignment with his colleague, a photographer. The photographer nearly runs over a hare while driving. Vatanen rescues the animal–which is never named–and nurses it back to health. Thus begins their relationship, where the hare accompanies Vatanen as he embarks on a series of small construction jobs throughout Finland, stretching from the south up to Lapland. As I am well familiar with Finnish geography I enjoyed placing the pair as they travelled to Turku, Rovaniemi and Sodankylä, all places I have been to. Vatanen finds himself sometimes in situations where he is out of place, and having the hare with him makes his predicament all the more strange. Yet the hare also serves as a welcome ice-breaker which endears him to others and enables him to infiltrate these foreign milieux.
Vatanen is menaced by a bear up north, and will not rest until he does away with it. He embarks upon a lengthy trip, skiing cross-country across the Russian frontier all the way to the White Sea and onto the ice where he finally confronts the bear and kills it. It was this part of the novel, in the final six chapters, that Paasilinna let fantasy take over from the easy-to-follow narrative. I must admit that I had to reread the first few pages of chapter nineteen in order to establish what was happening and where Vatanen was. All of a sudden he goes from the National Institute of Veterinary Science in Helsinki to finding himself wrapped up in a rug, severely hungover, and mysteriously now engaged to a woman (while still already being married). How did he get like that and did it all really happen or was it a drunken hallucination?
I liked Paasilinna’s eye for description and this rendering of Vatanen’s household gave me both a few laughs as well as a pair of imagined injured shins:
“Early in the marriage his wife had single-mindedly set out to assemble a common domicile, a home. Their apartment had become an extravagant farrago of shallow and meretricious interior-decoration tips from women’s magazines. A pseudo-radicalism governed the design, with huge posters and clumsy modular furniture. It was difficult to inhabit the rooms without injury; all the items were at odds. The home was distinctly reminiscent of Vatanen’s marriage.”