Finnish author Arto Paasilinna is a very productive author and very popular in Finland, and his books have been widely translated (only 2 into English, however). His novels are fast-paced, light and very humorous in style, and several are adventuresqe stories with a satirical angle, modern fables almost. The Year of the Hare belongs to this category. It is a strange, lovely, imaginative novel about an ex-journalist who is disgusted by the emptiness and meaninglessness of modern consumer society, and therefore sets out on a quest for “authentic life”. Which – as we all know – is something you find deep in the Finnish backwoods?

The main character is Kaarlo Vatanen. While driving on a country road, he hits a hare. Leaving his car and a colleague sitting within, Vatanen goes chasing the hare, finds it, and in a fit of guilt he decides to take to the wilds of Finland with the hare for company.

And what a journey he makes! There are strange adventures, unlikely events, and disasters aplenty in this book: arrest for possession of a hare; lots of heavy drinking; and a bear hunt; a chase into the Soviet Union, prison, and more. One wild and hilarious story follows another! The adventures show Vatanen and the hare much about the world they live in – about people’s avarice, about lacking humaneness, hypocrisy, cruelty, the evils of bureaucracy, and how many merely exist rather than live. It is a cruel awakening for Vatanen.

This a fabulously weird novel – somewhat like the remarkable Aleksis Kivi novel Seven Brothers, but an adventure of the kind you would probably expect to find in a Latin American novel, written by authors such as García Márquez or Paulo Coelho, rather than in a Finnish novel written in a very low-key, minimalist, factual style. The Year of the Hare is a book about a middle aged man’s crisis, a tale of breaking lose, about freedom, about the importance of happiness, and a tale of a wonderful, different, original adventure. The book is a little slow in the start, but it very soon picks up. A light, very enjoyable and very interesting read!

Links to books by Arto Paasilinna at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

The Beatles is a novel about the 1960’s. About four teenage boys growing up in Oslo. And a fabulously rich, elegant and compassionate book about growing up and being a teen-ager. In Norway, this was Saabye Christensen’s breakthrough novel. It achieved enormous success in Norway and still has something like a cult status. In fact, it was recently voted the most popular book in Norway.

Kim Karlsen and his three buddies Gunnar, Ola and Seb occasionally like to think of themselves as the big guys. But Beatles is not a story of the Beatles, nor is it only a story of four guys who thought they were the Beatles, or tried to be like the Beatles. To some extent it is, but it also is something a lot different and much more – a story about four young guys growing up in Norway in the late 60’s – during the time when Beatlemania was evident all over Europe.

And Beatles is the story of their friendship. It begins in 1965. And it is written in a neat way – each chapter takes a different Beatles-song as title and theme. It was a time when being a Beatles fan meant growing slightly longer hair – which at the time more or less signified rebellion. And it was a time when a new youth culture, opposed to the established and the previous generation, emerged, most places in a radical and liberated form. I don’t think the gap between two generations have ever been bigger than it was then.

Kim, Gunnar, Ola and Seb each takes on one of the Fab Four’s names. They plan to start their own outfit, The Snafus. They never got that far, but the idea was there, and in a sense organized their lives. Just as the idea of starting a band was in the heads of tens of thousands of young men throughout Europe at the time.

So instead of a story of The Snafus, we are fortunate enough to be read a tale of four young guys doing the things one did – struggling at school, seeing Playboy for the first time, getting attracted to girls, messing around, getting into gang fights, doing the booze and dope thingies, getting interested in politics, and all of that.

And then, like the real Beatles, they split up, move separate ways. And each has to find himself. Each now on their own. And face the music of real life – or the identity crises, the problems of identity creation, of forming new relationships, and all of that.

It is a warm, nice and lovely book, written in Lars Saabye Christensen’s beautiful, colorful language, and filled with humor, imagery, similes, metaphors and hyperboles. The translation by Don Bartlett is smooth as silk. Saabye Christensen’s Beatles is a timeless and enduring coming-of-age story taking place at a particularly interesting point in history and written in a fashion that everybody growing up during that time will recognize. It is also a literary masterpiece, a thing of beauty and a source of great joy. And – did I mention – fun to read!

Links to books by Lars Saabye Christensen at Amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Also, interestingly enough, if you are so inclined, you can also read a thorough and very interesting study of this book: Lars Saabye Christensen’s Beatles: A Study in Literary Translation and Cross-Cultural Influence, written by Kerstin Ketteman!