Last November I got the opportunity to see The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna at the Finnish National Theatre (it is the oldest Finnish-language professional theatre, established 1872). The Year of Hare is one of the most internationally successful Finnish book. And 2025 we are celebrating its 50th anniversary.
After reading the book I watched the movie again to complete the Trifecta of the Hare.
It is Midsummer’s Eve or Eve’s Eve in Finland in the mid-1970s. Sacred time. Mr Kaarlo Vatanen, the protagonist, is a journalist. He and his colleague are travelling to Helsinki by car somewhere in the Eastern Finland. His colleague is driving in a hurry. He wants to get to back to Helsinki or at least to a hotel and the hotel bar in the next town (Heinola). Vatanen, on the other hand, is quietly contemplating his life. Nothing is working; he writes commercial articles about subjects that are meaningless. The youthful zeal – the passion for changing the world – has gone away. His marriage is on the rocks. His wife is definitely cheating on him. Everything is so hectic.
The car hits something. They stop and Vatanen exists the vehicle. He finds a leveret – young hare – by the roadside. It has a broken leg from the impact. Vatanen makes a tourniquet for the leg, picks up the hare gently, and suddenly his old life is irrelevant and wrong in the soft Midsummer dusk.
Vatanen’s colleague wants to continue the journey, because the lure of the hotel bar is strong (I most certainly can relate). After a while, he takes off and leaves behind a solemn and spiritual Vatanen.
Vatanen sleeps the night in the forest, with the hare tucked into the jacket pocket. He doesn’t mind.
Thus begins Vatanen’s liberating journey through the Eastern, North-Eastern Finland leading to the Northernmost Lappland and then back to Helsinki. He is on the lam from his old life, financing it by selling his boat and taking odd jobs in forestry and construction (he renovates cabins in the woods). Vatanen is surprisingly proficient in those tasks, which to me indicates that like so many urban Finns his roots are in the countryside. He must be a farm boy. And he knows how to live a life of solitude deep in the woods, away from any kind of civilisation.
Finland circa 1975 was a top 30 (barely) country tucked in a remote corner of the world. We knew how to ski. The unemployment rate had risen to 3%. There was too much agricultural production (“butter mountains” in warehouses). Roughly 200 000 Finns (out of 4.5 million) had emigrated to Sweden in the 1960s – many of them from the countryside – to have a better life only to come visiting the old places next summer with a brand new car, either Volvo or Saab. Finns were the despised underclass in Sweden for a long time. “En finne igen!” the natives would cry, having encountered a drunk Finnish bum or merely a drunkard. Apart from our old colonial masters, nobody knew us.
Despite all this life was sort of good in the 1970s. A lot of the building blocks of a Nordic welfare society were built in Finland in the 70s and 80s. I am transported back 50 years to a time when summers has less sun or at least less heat. We were running in the woods all day. If you stop running the time will stand still. Endless boredom. So you run. High steps to avoid branches and rocks. (Additionally, I am getting oversatured with the modern monochromatic flat design world. I want colours. 1970s colours!)
At some point Vatanen et al. spends time in a cabin in a forest lake (it is small but not a pond), courtesy of a local nimismies (a rural police chief / prosecutor – a powerful position back in the day). Forests and lakes and forest lakes are embedded in the collective Finnish consciousness. In my frontal lobe right this very second a forest lake is surrounded by pines and birches. It is an early morning in the late Summer: the edge of the lake is laced with leaves and pine needles. The log cabin is dark brown, near the lake. Amidst the morning mist I hear the wailing of a loon.
In one key episode in the book another (retired) nimismies in the aforementioned cabin presents his studies about the-then President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen (president 1956-1982; and we have term limits nowadays) to Vatanen. His extensive studies show that at some point in mid-to-late 1960, Kekkonen’s skull shape changed and his height and weight increased and vocabulary expanded. (In the theatre this scene was amplified by a huge Kekkonen skull, the size roughly that of, say, an old Kenworth flat nose truck cabin.) Kekkonen was the President – in good and bad –, and switched version of him probably laughed his ass of when reading the novel.
In another scene the police chief comes to pick up Vatanen. There is a large forest fire nearby and his help is needed. (I was reading the book while there was the real thing going on in Los Angeles.) Vatanen guides people and cattle away from the fire, flirts and scores with a fair maiden, and saves a moonshiner with the obvious result: they both get very, very drunk. Finnish Culture 101.
The book has much more stories, such as a long and semi-mythical bear hunting and even more drinking. The important thing is that Vatanen clings to the hare the whole time. To me, it is Vatanen’s confidant and good luck charm; as long as it is with him, Vatanen is not sucked back to his old modern life.
In a way, The Year of the Hare deals with many of the same themes as Thoreau’s Walden: self-reliance, simplicity, mediation and slow pace of life. Arto Paasilinna writes his thesis in a more accessible and entertaining way, though.
We want to be free.
P.S. The pace has only gone faster and faster these past 50 years. What modern books deal with the same themes?