Hey Bookworm friends! I picked up The Year of the Hare for a buddy read and I had quite the journey with it. And I don’t mean a pleasant journey with a picnic in the park, no. I’ll be honest, this is going to be a 1 star review so proceed if that’s something you don’t mind reading. I don’t write very many negative reviews mostly because I DNF books if I dislike them that strongly. I almost DNF’d this one but I bought it on my honeymoon in Finland a few years back so I felt I had to give it a fair shake. That, and my friends had already finished it so I thought we might as well all suffer together 😂.
❗Please note that this review will contain spoilers. Take this as your warning and read at your own risk!
Disclaimer: If I hate a book other readers love it’s not a personal judgement of them. We all look for different things in books when we read and I have no patience for shaming people for their reading preferences.
Book Details
The Year of the Hare
by Arto Paasilinna, Translated by Herbert Lomas
Genre: Literary Fiction
Standalone
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Format Read: Paperback
Year Published: 1975
Cover Artist: Russell Cobb
Themes & Tropes
Adventure │Animal Hunting│Politics│Wild Fires│Unconventional Lifestyle
Content Warnings:
Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Alcoholism, Fire/Fire Injury/ Injury Detail, Violence, Infidelity, Abortion
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Blurb
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Kaarlo Vatanen is fed up with his life. He’s sick of his job, his wife, his urban lifestyle in Helsinki. But all this changes one warm summer’s evening, when he encounters an injured hare on a deserted country road.
On an impulse he can’t fully explain, Vatanen abruptly abandons his car, his home, his wife and his job to chase the hare into the forest. A year of comic misadventures ensues, where Vatanen and his unlikely companion battle through forest fires, pagan sacrifices, military war games and encounters with murderous bears, kept afloat by the help and understanding of other sympathetic free spirits.
A much-loved classic in Finland, The Year of the Hare is a freewheeling adventure through the Finnish countryside, and a witty portrayal of one man’s long detour from conventional living.
Review
A Finnish Classic That Didn’t Work For Me.
To begin, I should say that The Year of the Hare is way outside of my comfort zone in the first place. I wanted to try something different and I had seen the booktuber, emmiereads, mention it and I thought the premise sounded intriguing. However, I entirely misunderstood what the tone of this book was going to be. I was expecting a slow, thoughtful story about a man taking care of a hare and thinking about his life. What I got instead was a madcap, almost-absurdist, misadventure that jumped around from scene to scene faster than a hare. And the thing is, I did sort of enjoy it at the beginning. It’s meant to be funny, and has a slapstick-y energy to it, with all the trouble Vatanen gets himself into and, I won’t lie, I did chuckle at times.
“She began to cry. “Cry quicker, or the call’ll get too expensive.””
But the comedy only lasted so long; this is the most “written by a man” book I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Vatanen’s wife is basically a caricature of a “nagging wife”and Vatanen goes around sleeping with women then complaining about “randy women displaying themselves for picking and choosing”. What any women see in him is beyond me because Vatanen doesn’t display any attractive or positive qualities at any point and yet they flock to him!
And then came chapter 13 or ‘The Raven’; The point where I suddenly almost gave up. Up until now we were lead to believe that Vatanen loves animals but he suddenly does the most needlessly cruel thing I’ve ever read. And he laughs about it. At that point I needed to take a few days off reading because I was livid and disgusted. If you’re sensitive to animal abuse, there is zero need for you to read this. Save yourself. There’s an argument that I should have stopped but I persisted and here is where everything snowballed into more problems. The problem of Vatanen’s characterization and the problem of futility.
‘He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone, in his own way.’
Let’s start with Vatanen’s characterization. As mentioned, this “animal lover” is exposed to be anything but. Sure, he feeds the hare, protects the hare, is happy upon reuniting with the hare but it’s because he only values the hare in a material way because it’s HIS hare. He doesn’t genuinely care for its well-being. Once I realized this, I felt dread at having to be in this character’s company for another 80 pages. It’s exhausting because we follow only him the entire time, everyone else is a set piece. Heck, half the time even he felt like a cardboard cut-out floating down a river. Vatanen was painfully passive in the face of insane situation, like he was just allowing the plot to happen TO him. The rest of the time his choices were consistently incomprehensible and he has no sense of self-preservation. Pure Darwin Award material. By the end of the book he’d supposedly achieved a list of impressive feats, the author painting him as some sort of great hero. But on the page, his actions were those of a bumbling idiot. It simply does not add up.
“Sometimes conceiving an affection for an animal is easier than for a human.”
I have never cheered for the death of the main character so much. In fact, I feel like I would have forgiven the book for a lot if he had died because then the story would have meant something. But instead there was absolutely no character growth, and no depth. All I was left with at the end were unbelievable leaps of logic and infuriating time jumps. And so much time talking about trying to kill different animals. I always try to find something positive in each book that I read but I’m at a loss; it’s simply a waste of time.
Let’s chat in the comments!
What’s the last book that deeply disappointed you? Or one that enraged you?
