The Year of the Hare

Table of Contents

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

ARTO PAASILINNA was born in Lapland, Finland, in 1942. By turns woodcutter, agricultural laborer, journalist, and poet, he is also an award-winning author of more than thirty novels, all of which have been translated into numerous languages. He lives in Helsinki, Finland.

 

PICO IYER’S essay for
The New York Times
about leaving a life as a successful journalist for a simpler life became one of its most e-mailed articles. Iyer is the author of two novels and numerous nonfiction books about the cultures of the world. He has never been to Finland except through the pages of this book.

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First published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Publishers 1995
First published in the United States of America by Peter Owen Publishers 2006
This edition with an introduction by Pico Iyer published in Penguin Books 2010

Translation copyright © Herbert Lomas, 1995 Introduction copyright © Pico Iyer, 2010

All rights reserved

Translated from the Finnish
Janiksen vuosi

Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Paasilinna, Arto, 1942-
[Jäniksen vuosi. English]
The year of the hare : a novel / Arto Paasilinna ; [translated from the Finnish by
Herbert Lomas] ; forward by Pico Iyer.
p. cm.
“Translation copyright Herbert Lomas, 1995”—T.p. verso.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47813-4

1. Rabbits—Fiction. 2. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 3. Finland—
Fiction. I. Lomas, Herbert. II. Iyer, Pico. III. Title.
PH355.P22J’.54133—dc22 2010035411

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FOREWORD

W
hich of us has not had that wonderfully seditious idea: to play hooky for a while from life as we know it? To do a Gauguin, even in the depths of the Arctic Circle, dropping all the stuff that seems so important—a regular job, a good salary, a solid home—and going off in search of what is really more sustaining: adventure, restoration, fun. To walk, like Thoreau, away from the community one knows too well and to sit still in the forest, where suddenly our companions are the stars, the creatures we’ve never stopped to notice before, other eccentric dropouts, even the pinch of bitter cold. In an age when more and more of us are assaulted, around the clock, by beeping cell phones, chiming laptops, twittering handheld devices, and calls from the boss—when even the division between home and office is dissolved—something in us almost cries out for time and freedom and something zesty and close to the ground.

In Zen practice, students are woken up by a sharp wooden stick cracked down on each shoulder, in the meditation hall. In Arto Paasilinna’s
Year of the Hare
, the unlikely catalyst to awakening is a hare running across a road and its violent meeting with a car.

 

 

I came upon Paasilinna’s novel, which was first published in 1975 and has been translated into everything from Hungarian to Japanese, much too recently. It is part of an oeuvre that has been delighting Finns for decades, and I could instantly see how an antic, amiable, harebrained kind of logic governed the Mad Hatter satire. The prose is brisk, even as it describes a life of ambling, and the story zigzags to and fro much as its vagabond hero does. But always it maintains its topsy-turvy, frolicsome pace, as if to suggest that every kind of order and ceremony must be turned on its head. Vatanen the journalist slips out of a hotel room—as if it were a prison—and starts inspecting a prison (as if it were a hotel). The police superintendent he meets turns out to be something of a delinquent, too, off with a retired colleague, fishing. Very soon, in fact, it appears that everywhere people are hungering to get away from society’s rules and find a life of ease and planlessness that can bring them closer to creatures of the wild.

As the novel goes on, it seems that one character after another is falling into a lake, getting stuck in the mud, needing somehow to be rescued (and Vatanen’s odd jobs all involve reclamation). A church becomes the setting for a crazy game of cross-species hide-and-seek, and a pastor turns into a gun-wielding maniac even as a bum becomes an unlikely Samaritan. When we meet a group of officials, they, too, are soon—quite literally—stripped of all their clothes, so that it becomes ever harder to tell the humans from the animals (the most simpatico creature in the book, after all, is four-legged). It sometimes feels—such is the runaway pace of the shaggy-hare subversion—that the whole novel is drunk, starting out relatively upright and conventional but soon keeling over, rubbing its forehead, and wondering what in the world is going to happen next.

 

 

My life—alas—has never been quite so slapstick, but I know a little about the impulse Paasilinna’s journalist discovers. When I was twenty-six I was securely nestled in an office in Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, writing international affairs articles for
Time
magazine, with not a seeming care in the world. I took my holidays in Bali and El Salvador, I headed off for weekends to New Orleans or Key West, I imagined myself at the center of the universe. Then, on a layover on one such trip, forced to spend a night near Narita Airport in Tokyo, I went into the little town near the airport hotel a few hours before my flight, and suddenly I was slapped awake.

No hare was scampering across the road, but something in the collected stillness of the scene, the chill sunshine of a late October day, the mix of familiarity and strangeness, the sense of possibility in the ringing emptiness felt like a home I’d been seeking without knowing it. Here was something none of my pension plans or glittery nights could buy. Here, in fact, was a wealth, a reality, a sense of spaciousness far beyond anything I could imagine in the time-bound life I’d reflexively fallen into. It was like waking from a dream I hadn’t known I’d slipped into, and when I flew back to New York that afternoon, a part of me knew that most of me wasn’t heading back at all.

So something in me—and I suspect in many of us—feels the pull toward the primal and the essential that Paasilinna’s hero follows as he drifts farther and farther from civilization and starts making the news instead of just reporting on it. His senses are sharpened, we read, and food has a taste it never had before. He is unquestionably alive, a part of the rhythm of nature, and at times he even seems useful. At the very least, he cares for things (his inseparable companion and familiar, the hare, and his life of unanxious spontaneity) as he never cared for anything before. There is a sense in which he has thrown his arms around impermanence now, a freedom from routine, and can cheerfully become one with the events that whiz by as zanily as in some animated, or even graphic, novel.

The beautiful surprise of his rebellion is, of course, that he quickly falls into a whole community of idlers, as he relies on the kindness of strangers and tumbles through the hard ice of society into a much more fluid, if unreliable, world. Officials affably shrug at him; in one sentence, he ends up in a fight, in the next (quite literally), he falls under a train. When “the biggest fire in Finnish history” roars over a patch of water, the newly emancipated Vatanen and another slacker simply laugh and enjoy the show. This may sound in poor taste to conventional ears, but when my house burned down, in what was then the worst fire in California history, and my family and I lost everything we owned, we realized that complaints were futile, and I sat in the car at one point, surrounded by seventy-foot flames, knowing I could do nothing, and listened to an opera on the radio.

All society is something of a burning house in Paasilinna’s vision, and the very notion that you are “master of your destiny” is something of a laughable illusion. Life is a matter of seeing what you can do to fix things and of savoring with glee the moments when you can’t do anything at all. The structures we occupy, which often seem so important, sit very thinly and tenuously on the ground in this book, and in a moment a job, a house, a life can be gone forever.

There are many ways of catching this carpe-diem spirit and the liberation that comes from waking up to one’s limits (and therefore one’s possibilities), and philosophers for centuries have expounded sonorously on these themes. I love
The Year of the Hare
for not taking anything too seriously (least of all itself) and for sounding, in its freedom from received ideas of what is and isn’t important, a bracing declaration of independence for the enlightened truant inside each one of us. Which of us wouldn’t secretly want to live in a novel as fresh and as full of events as this one?