The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna [2]
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