The Year of the Hare

November 8, 2010
First published in 1975 at the height of the back-to-nature movement, Paasilinna's charming, low-key allegory pursues a journalist abandoning his Helsinki life for the companionship of a pet hare. Approaching middle age—"the hopes of youth had not been realized, far from it"—Kaarlo Vatanen takes off after a hare he and his friend have accidentally hit while driving. He tends to the hare's leg, befriends the critter, deserts his friend, gradually sheds his former life, and eventually refits a cozy cabin in the wilds of Lapland. Paasilinna fashions in each step of Kaarlo's transformation a test of society's institutions, and finds each, not surprisingly, wanting, from law enforcement and the construction industry to the army. The hare, meanwhile, is innocently plucky, leaving his droppings on the altar of a church and in the soup of a Swedish lady. It's cute enough, if baldly obvious in the way that parables often are.

January 1, 2004
A man abandons his conventional life and hits the road with a hare in this offbeat picaresque fable.

September 4, 1995
In this back-to-nature picaresque from Finland, a ``dissatisfied, cynical'' journalist adopts an injured leveret as his companion on a series of mildly quixotic, satirically rendered wanderings. Leaving behind a spiritless job and a loveless marriage in Helsinki, middle-aged Kaarlo Vatanen lights out for the territories, the hare de-civilizing him as much as he tames it. While the hare wavers between companion, pet and symbol, the pair's innocent retreat is complicated at every turn by either man or nature. Foresters, bureaucrats and endangered-species laws are as likely to threaten them as bears, ravens and forest fires as they travel to the Arctic Circle and across the Russian border. Paasilinna's low-key narrative is translated plainly, but it never makes the most of its protagonists' experiences, despite such tempting scenarios as a bear hunt hosted for diplomats by the Finnish military or a defrocked divinity student looking for animal sacrifices for Finno-Ugric rituals. Instead, these adventures of a man and his hare unfold as superficially, though with as much ease, as a daydream.