The Year of the Hare (Finnish: Jäniksen vuosi) is a 1975 novel by Finnish author Arto Paasilinna. It tells the story of Kaarlo Vatanen, a frustrated journalist, who, after nearly killing a hare with his car, decides to live with the hare in the wilderness.
The novel has been translated into over a dozen languages including English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Slovenian and Estonian. It is Paasilinna's most widely read work and was included in 1994 in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works which funded the 1995 English translation by Herbert Lomas. It was adapted twice into feature films: a Finnish 1977 film called The Year of the Hare, and a 2006 French film directed by Marc Rivière called Le Lièvre de Vatanen.
Famous quotes containing the words the year, year and/or hare:
“For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Listen, that’s the one that done it. The dusters. They started it anyways. Blowin’ like this year after year. Blowin’ the land away. Blowin’ the crops away. Blowin’ us away now.”
—Nunnally Johnson (1897–1977)
“I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)