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 year and/or hare:
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)