FINLAND

READ

I finished reading The Year of the Hare, by Arto Paasilinna, yesterday, and I’m still trying to process what I read. What began as a delightful story about a man rescuing an injured hare turned into something progressively more bizarre and considerably less delightful.

Vatanen, a journalist for a magazine, is on assignment with a photographer. The photographer is driving when the car suddenly hits a young hare in the middle of the road. They stop the car, and Vatanen runs into the forest looking for the injured hare. He finds it and improvises a splint for its broken leg. The photographer waits quite awhile for Vatanen to come back, and when he doesn’t return, the photographer leaves without him. Left alone with the hare, Vatanen comes to the realization that he really doesn’t like his wife and isn’t particularly fond of his job. He decides to leave everything behind and travel the country with the hare.

Vatanen and the hare go from town to town, where Vatanen picks up odd jobs and they meet an array of colorful characters. There’s a retired police superintendent who believes the country’s president has been replaced by an impostor, a rector who’s distressed to find a hare romping around in his church, a ski instructor who performs animal sacrifices, and a woman who insists she and Vatanen are engaged.

Through all his experiences, Vatanen’s devotion to the hare remains constant, even though there are a few times when he takes a curiously hands-off approach to ordeals the hare is facing. He must remain ever vigilant, as it seems there is always someone trying to separate him from the hare for one reason or another.

As I read about the increasingly implausible situations in which Vatanen found himself, it was hard to avoid the realization that The Year of the Hare is a satirical look at the way we live our lives. As Pico Iyer says in the book’s foreword:

               “All society is something of a burning house in Passilinna’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.”

COOK

Scenes involving eating and drinking were plentiful in The Year of the Hare, but with the exception of rye bread and hot potatoes, the characters seemed to eat nothing but animal products. I took to the Internet to see what Finnish vegan dishes I could find, and I came across a really good one – pannukakku, which is a baked Finnish pancake. I found a recipe for a vegan version of this delectable dish in the “How to Philosophize with Cake” blog. The pancake, which looks like cake on the outside, has a custard-like consistency on the inside. The recipe includes instructions on how to make a blueberry compote to serve over the pancake, but I decided to go with lingonberry compote instead. I mixed a ten-ounce jar of lingonberries with a tablespoon of soaked chia seeds, a tablespoon of maple syrup, and a tablespoon of water, then warmed it up in a saucepan. It was delicious with the pancake, but honestly, I think the warmed-up lingonberries would have been a perfectly fine topping on their own. At any rate, I loved this dish!

GIVE

Since one of the main characters in The Year of the Hare is, of course, the hare, I decided it would be appropriate to make my donation to an animal welfare organization. I searched online and found SEY (Suomen Eläinsuojelu), which claims to be “the biggest and most influential animal welfare group and animal protection expert in Finland.” SEY, “the Finnish Federation for Animal Welfare Associations, acts and operates to promote the welfare of and respect for all animals.” The organization’s advocacy efforts are not only for pets, but for wild animals (such as the hare!) as well. More information about SEY can be found at https://www.sey.fi/en/.

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