The Year of the Hare Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - The Hare

  Chapter 2 - Statement of Account

  Chapter 3 - Arrangements

  Chapter 4 - Grasses

  Chapter 5 - Arrest

  Chapter 6 - The District Superintendent

  Chapter 7 - The President

  Chapter 8 - Forest Fire

  Chapter 9 - In the Marsh

  Chapter 10 - In the Church

  Chapter 11 - Granddad

  Chapter 12 - Kurko

  Chapter 13 - The Raven

  Chapter 14 - The Sacrificer

  Chapter 15 - The Bear

  Chapter 16 - The Dinner

  Chapter 17 - The Fire

  Chapter 18 - To Helsinki

  Chapter 19 - Crapula

  Chapter 20 - Humiliation

  Chapter 21 - A Visit

  Chapter 22 - The White Sea

  Chapter 23 - In Government Hands

  Chapter 24 - Afterword

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Year of the Hare

  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.

  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOREWORD

  Which 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?

  Pico Iyer

  Nara, Japan

  1

  The Hare

  Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was hurting their eyes through the dusty windshield. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy byroad was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.

  They were a journalist and a photographer, out on assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, approaching middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.

  They’d just been arguing. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren’t speaking.

  They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, as self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wretched their cantankerousness was. It was a stubborn, wearying drag of a journey.

  On the crest of a hillock, an immature hare was trying its leaps in the middle of the road. Tipsy with summer, it perched on its hind legs, framed by the red sun.

  The photographer, who was driving, saw the little creature, but his dull brain reacted too slowly: a dusty city shoe slammed hard on the brake, too late. The shocked animal leaped up in front of the car, there was a muffled thump as it hit the corner of the windshield, and it hurtled off into the forest.

  “God! That was a hare,” the journalist said.

  “Damn animal—good thing it didn’t bust the windshield.” The photographer pulled up and backed to the spot. The journalist got out and ran into the forest.

  “Well, can you see anything?” the photographer called, listlessly. He had cranked down the window, but the engine was still running.

  “What?” shouted the journalist.

  The photographer lit a cigarette and drew on it, with eyes closed. He revived when the cigarette burned his fingers.

  “Come on out! I can’t hang around here forever because of some stupid hare!”

  The journalist went distractedly through the thinly treed forest, came to a small clearing, hopped a ditch, and looked hard at a patch of dark-green grass. He could see the young hare there in the grass.

  Its left hind leg was broken. The cracked shin hung pitifully, too painful for the animal to run, though it saw a human being approaching.

  The journalist picked up the young hare and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little fore-paws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

  Back on the road there was an irritable revving, two impatient blasts on the horn, and a shout: “Come on out! We’ll never make Helsinki if you hang around in this wilderness! Out of there—now!—or you’ll have to find your own way back!”

  There was no reply. The journalist was nursing the little animal in his arms. Apparently, it was hurt only in the leg. It was gradually calming down.

  The photographer got out. He looked furiously into the forest but could see nothing of his companion. He swore, lit another cigarette, and stamped back to the road. Still no sound from the forest. He stubbed out his cigarette on the road and yelled: “Stay there, then! Good-bye, nutcase!”

  He listened for another moment but, getting no reply, stormed into the car, revved up, engaged the clutch, and shot off. Gravel spat under the wheels. In a moment the car was out of sight.

  The journalist sat on the edge of the ditch, holding the hare in his lap, like an old woman with her knitting on her knees, lost in thought. The sound of the car engine faded away. The sun set.

  The journalist put down the hare on the grass. For a moment he was afraid it would try to escape; but it huddled in the grass, and when he picked it up again, it showed no sign of fear at all.

  “So here we are,” he said to the hare. “Left.”

  That was the situation: he was sitting alone in the forest, in his jacket, on a summer evening. No disputing it—he’d been abandoned.

  What does one usually do in such a situation? Perhaps he should have responded to the photographer’s shouts, he thought. Now maybe he ought to find his way back to the road, wait for the next car, hitch a ride, and think about getting to Heinola, or Helsinki, under his own steam.

  The idea was immensely unappealing.

  The journalist looked in his briefcase. There were a few banknotes, his press card, his health insurance card, a photograph of his wife, a few coins, a couple of condoms, a bunch of keys, an old May Day celebration badge. And also some pens, a notepad, a ring. The management had printed on the pad Kaarlo Vatanen, journalist. His health insurance card indicated that Kaarlo Vatanen had been bor
n in 1942.

  Vatanen got to his feet, gazed at the sunset’s last redness through the trees, nodded to the hare. He looked toward the road but made no move that way. He picked up the hare off the grass, put it tenderly in the side pocket of his jacket, and left the clearing for the darkening forest.

  The photographer drove to Heinola, raging. There he filled up the tank and decided to check into the hotel the journalist had suggested.

  He claimed a double room, threw off his dusty clothes, and took a shower. Refreshed, he went down to the hotel restaurant. Vatanen would certainly appear there soon, he thought. Then they could talk the whole thing through, sort it out. He consumed several bottles of beer, had a meal, and moved on to stronger drinks.

  But there was still no sign of the journalist.

  Late into the night, he was still sitting in the hotel bar. He contemplated the black surface of the bar counter in a mood of angry regret. As the evening went by he had been mulling over what had happened. It had dawned on him that abandoning his companion in the forest, in an almost deserted neighborhood, had been a mistake. Suppose the journalist had broken his leg in the forest? Could he have gotten lost? Or stuck in a bog? Otherwise, surely, he’d have found his way back to Heinola by now, even on foot?

  The photographer thought he’d better call the journalist’s wife in Helsinki.

  She muttered sleepily that there’d been no sign of Vatanen and, when she realized the caller was drunk, banged the receiver down. The photographer tried the same number again, but there was no reply. Clearly, Vatanen’s wife had unplugged the telephone.

  In the early hours, the photographer called for a taxi. He’d decided to go back to the site and see if Vatanen was still there. The taxi driver asked his drunken passenger where he wanted to go.

  “Just drive along this road, nowhere in particular. I’ll tell you where to stop.”