Finland - The Year of the Hare

Country: Finland
Book: The Year of the Hare (Jäniksen vuosi)
Author: Arto Paasilinna
Publication Year: 1975 (English language version: 1995)
Genre: Fiction

"Finland , Finland , Finland.
The country where I quite want to be.
Your mountains so lofty.
Your treetops so tall.
Finland , Finland , Finland.
Finland has it all."

With 197 countries to pass through, sometimes you have to pick the most well known novel from that country and go on your way. For the tiny European country of Finland, that novel is arguably The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna.

In referring to Finland as tiny, I mean only in terms of the number of people who live there. With a population of less than 6,000,000, Finland is a tenth as densely populated as the UK (while being bigger in terms of surfce area). Yet like all Scandinavian countries it has a high standard of living and its infrastructure is said (on YouTube architectural channels I have watched) to be insanely well designed.

Finland is in many ways the odd one out among the Nordic countries. The official language of Finnish is not a Germanic language like Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. On the Indo-European language tree, it sits on the Finno-Ugric branch, along with Hungarian, Estonian and a number of minor languages spoken in isolated parts of Russia.

Like England, Finland was under occupation by its neighbouring Sweden for several hundred years and as French was the official language of the English court for a period of 300 years, so Swedish became the official language of the state. Finnish was relegated to a language spoken by the peasantry as English was only spoken by serfs from 1066 until the time of Geoffrey Chaucer. Swedish remains one of the two official languages of Finland.

If Finland is small, Lapland to the north of the country is even smaller with a population under 200,000. It is traditionally the region of the world where Santa Claus lives. It is also the birth place of our writer of choice, Arto Paasilinna.

Paasilinna is one of the most well known writers outside of Finland. His books have been translated into nearly thirty languages and The Year of the Hare was a bestseller when it was released in 1975, although it was only translated into English in the mid 90s, despite being popular in other countries, especially France, from the time it was released.

The book is basically a shaggy-dog story. Or a shaggy-hare story (to quote from the Forward by Pico Iyer). Journalist, Kaarlo Vatanen, goes through a comical series of aventures after the car he is travelling in injures a young hare on the road. The animal becomes his pet and travelling companion as he evades his agent, editor and wife, heading deeper into the Finish wilderness.

The hare is a metaphor here for madness. Mad As a March Hare and all that, as popularised by Lewis Carol on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Indeed, Vatanen’s behaviour becomes more and more unhinged as he goes, going on a month long bender at one point and becoming engaged to a lawyer, despite being still married to his now very much estranged wife.

Other calamities and comic misunderstandings are not entirely Vatanen’s fault. He tries to get medical assistance for an old man who turns out to have died the day before. He causes a priest to shoot himself in the foot chasing the hare through his church. He chases a dangerous bear for days on skis and travels all the way into Soviet Russia.

Vatanen is arrested by the Russian army, extradited to Finland and imprisoned for a litany of offences. Yet this shaggy-hare story keeps one more twist at the end of its tale.

Writers invariably cherry pick from their own lives (half of Conan-Doyle’s characters are doctors, as he was himself a GP). Vatanen’s year of pilgrimage (to borrow from both Liszt and Haruki Murakami) mirror Paasilinna’s career. He starts life as a journalist, as Paasilinna was a journalist. He works as a forester and agricultural labourer, as Paasilinna did at points in his life.

Like many books that appeal to an audience beyond their host country, the narrative tropes of The Year of the Hare are universal. The journey of the comic, haphazard protagonist goes back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and arguably all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey. We can place The Year of the Hare in a cannon that includes, Gulliver’s Travels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Orlando, Travels With My Aunt and On the Road. Not too shabby at all.

Arto Paasilinna is another author to whom I am sure to cycle back around at some point in the future. I am acutely aware that the first few countries on this literary list will receive short shrift due to my keenness to sink my teeth into the project and blitz through some authors so I have to have something to write about. Finland is a country that intrigues me and I might do a deeper dive into its literature at a future point in time. For now, The Year of the Hare will have to suffice.

Travel, humour, forest fires, alcohol, sauna, bears, tundra and tilting at helicopters. The Year of the Hare, like Finland, has it all.

Arto Paasilinna