As I’ve found repeatedly during the course of this project, some books select themselves. In the case of Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, the sheer number of people who recommended it made it the only choice. Everyone I spoke to who had anything to say about Finnish literature wanted me to read this book.

The narrative follows Vatanen, a washed-up hack, who finds himself stranded when his photographer drives off and leaves him after their car hits a hare on their way to an assignment. Alone in the woods with nothing but the wounded animal for company, he decides to break with his joyless existence and takes off on a madcap adventure that sees him fighting forest fires,  dragging a cow out of a swamp, evading the police, and pursuing a bear to the edge of the White Sea.

This is a deeply funny book with its comedy working on several levels. Paasilinna engineers delightfully ludicrous scenarios – from the crazed bulldozer driver who ploughs his machine out to its doom in the middle of a frozen lake and then sits on its roof cursing onlookers and appealing for rescue, to the genteel woman politely picking hare droppings out of her soup. But he also excels at capturing the knots and non sequiturs in which people tie themselves up – none more so than Vatanen’s wife, whose reaction when she finally gets him on the phone is priceless:

‘If this is looking for a divorce, it won’t work, I can tell you! I’m not letting you off that way when you’ve ruined my life – eight years down the drain because of you! Daft I was to take you!’

The comedy is only one side of it, though. Beneath the robust surface of the jokes and the delicious, picaresque plot, which sees new intrigues erupting in every chapter, moves the swell of a much more profound coming to consciousness. Stripped of the trappings of his lacklustre, urban existence, Vatanen has the space to work out what he really needs for a fulfilling life. His discovery of the simple truth is quietly beautiful:

‘There was a half-moon, and the stars were glimmering faintly in the frozen evening. He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone in one’s own way.’

This undertow of self-discovery pulls the narrative along, making the more random episodes – which occasionally feel like short stories rather than chapters in a novel – skim effortlessly along its currents. With the hare as a kind of yardstick for his emotional state, Vatanen sounds the depths of experience. The result is joyful, surprising and touching – definitely one I’ll be reading again.

The Year of the Hare (Janiksen vuosi) by Arto Paasilinna, translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas (Peter Owen Publishers, 2009)