"Crapula"

The Year of the Hare/Jäniksen vuosi by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna was published in Finnish in 1975. The English translation did not come out until 1995. It was favorably reviewed by the NYT. It is an interesting premise - a man, Vatanen, who is having a midlife crisis, nurtures a young leveret back to health, and spends the year traveling around the country with said leveret.

At times the book is quite funny, unfortunately somethings fail to translate. The translator, Herbert Lomas, no doubt did a great job, but the combination of twenty years between publication and translation, plus the challenge of translating humor makes the book less amusing than one might expect. The vocabulary choices were sometimes quite odd too. For instance one chapter is titled 'crapula.' Which comes from Latin and means very drunk. It is not a very common word in American English and sounds very much like crapola - rubbish.

Now that I have criticized it, it was selected for inclusion in UNESCO's collection of representative works.

There are also some very dark moments where Vatanen is very cruel, and others where he is treated cruelly. Knowing that it is a funny book in Finnish makes me suspect that these moments are not intended to come out as cruel and unpleasant. Despite these defects, the book is interesting and readable.