I’ve got a new blog post up on ESPN.com about Aroldis Chapman and Matt Purke with some other AFL/instructional league notes.
Also, congratulations to all of my Cardinals-fan readers. It’s a little scary to think they pulled this off before any of their high-end pitching prospects reached the majors.
And finally, boardgame designer Reiner Knizia has a new solitaire puzzle/game app available called Lines of Gold for just $0.99. I’ve played it twice so far and find it surprisingly complex for a simple set of rules; you can play it quickly, but playing it well seems to take a lot of forethought and a little luck.
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Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare
The protagonist, Charles Vatanen, is a disaffected if successful journalist with a shrewish wife and a boat he doesn’t need, so walking away from his life proves easier than it might for most men of his age. When the car in which he’s riding hits the hare and breaks its leg, he makes a splint for the hare and decides to carry it with him while nursing it back to health. His rejection of modern society and its rampant, empty consumerism leads him to take odd jobs in small towns in the Finnish countryside, including restoring a dilapidated cabin, where he ends up in an extended struggle with a bear who resents the human intrusion into his forest, a chase that goes on for an impossibly long period until Vatanen is arrested by friendly Soviet officials for illegally crossing the border. There’s also an alcohol-induced blackout, a peculiar lawyer, the illegal sale of sunken German munitions, and a wargame put on for the benefit of tourists that leads to a literal and figurative tug-of-war over the hare.
The problem with The Year of the Hare is that it’s more escapist fantasy than actual fable. A fable should have some point, whether it presents a metaphor for some aspect of life or mines humor from parody, but there’s no such cohesion in Paasilinna’s work here. We could interpret the scene in the church, where a priest sees the hare on the altar and ends up chasing it around the building with a pistol before inadvertently shooting himself, as a commentary on the decline of religion in Finland, but I couldn’t read that passage as more than slapstick, with a robed figure running through his own church shooting at a tiny rabbit and putting a bullet through his own foot as well as through the knee of the Christ figure in the apse. Vatanen isn’t running away from anything except the vapidity of modern urban life – something I think many readers can respect and understand regardless of wehre they live – but he’s not really running towards anything. It’s one thing to check out, but another to live as a vagrant without any kind of plan for survival once the cash runs out.
I can’t be certain of this but I believe the translation did Paasilinna no favors. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, like Hungarian (Magyar) and Estonian, completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages (including English) that dominate Europe, which might make the translation more difficult. Regardless, referring to a helicopter as a “warplane” or saying that, “The hare was rather nervous; the raven had evidently been molesting it while Vatanen was away working,” is like playing a piano that’s out of tune; either the translator doesn’t speak colloquial English, or Finnish is the weirdest language on earth.
Italo Calvino is probably the best fabulist I’ve come across, and while it’s not my favorite work of his, Marcovaldo: or the Seasons in the City
Next up: George Gissing’s novel about struggling writers in late 1800s London, New Grub Street
Your chat on Friday said you were putting up a board game review. Just wanted to see if you ever played Stone Age? I just had the chance and it was really fun! I’d love to see a full write up on that and your comparisons some day.
On a food related note: I think I’ve decided to stop ordering risotto when I’m out to eat. Seems like there’s a wide interpretation for what constitutes risotto, even among well respected chefs. I end up enjoying it about 1 in 3 times. Have you had any similar experience?
I haven’t read the book, but an aspect of your review strikes me as a bit odd – you categorize it at the beginning of the review as “more a fable than a full-length novel,” then go on to criticize it for being “more escapist fantasy than fable.” If it’s escapist fantasy, why categorize it as a fable in the first place? And should it really matter what category a book falls into – shouldn’t we judge a book on its own merits, regardless of the genre it falls into? By placing a book in a particular genre in the first place, don’t we run the risk of saddling it with artificial rules and expectations?
Furthermore, by saying “The problem with The Year of the Hare is that it’s more escapist fantasy than fable,” you are implicitly criticizing escapist fantasy. Do you truly believe that the genre is inherently inferior? It is quite reasonable to criticize The Year of the Hare as lacking cohesion, but this is the fault of that particular book, not an entire genre – unless, of course, you view escapist fantasy as characteristically lacking cohesion. In that case, I would be interested in hearing your explanation for such a view and/or what exactly you mean by escapist fiction.
I don’t think characterizing books in genres is completely useless – I think many of us do naturally prefer certain genres (I’m more likely to enjoy an average work of historical fiction than an average romance, for example). I do, however, think that we should ignore genre when judging a book. I feel like a better way to phrase this may have been: ‘The Year of the Hare is a cross between fable and escapist fiction; it generally reads as a fable but lacks the underlying metaphor or parody typically found in fable, and ultimately is unsatisfactory because it lacks cohesion and a point or idea it is moving towards.” I know that’s a bit of a picky distinction, but I think it is no less important for that.
You caught a mistake, Preston. I’ve fixed it (the first “fable” should have said “novella” – I was merely commenting on length).
I talk about genres because I’m not a critic, just a heavy reader, and one of my goals here is to help my readers make informed decisions about what books they might want to read. The other goal, of course, is just to discuss these books with readers, although in this case I appear to have hit on a title none of you has read yet.
Ah, that makes more sense now. I do think it’s worth bringing up genre for precisely the reason you mention – that it can help guide peple to books they are more lkely to enjoy. At the same time, I don’t think we should penalize a book for failing to conform to its genre – indeed, I would argue that many great books subvert the conventions of their genre. Of course, the condentions of genres exist for a reason, so an author should certainly be thoughtful in breaking from them. I am stil curious as to whether you see this lack of cohesion, etc., as characteristic of escapist fantasy – by noting it’s a “problem” that The Year of the Hare falls into that category, you seem to be implying that is the case, but perhaps I am reading more into that than you intended.
Steppung back for a second, the more I think about this, the more I suspect I misread your use of the term ‘escapist fantasy’ – the term fantasy (especially when paired with ‘escapist’) is a loaded one, as that genre is often dismissed (not by you) as puerile, trashy, and even escapist (as if that naturally has a negative connotation). Reading back over it, though, I think you were using the word fantasy to mean, more or less, a wild dream, that this is his own personal escapist fantasy, rather than using the term as a characterization of genre. If so, I withdraw my objections and merely note that lanuage can be a funny and wonderfully confusing thing at times, even in the most skilled of hands.
Lines of gold is so difficult! It makes me feel like an idiot. I dont understand how such a simple game can be so hard to win.
Also, recently purchased the MLB at bat app after many references to it on the podcast. It is amazing. You seem to be one of the few writers talking about it. I think if MLB worked to subsidize the purchase for people under 25 and those overseas they could really build some long term interest in the sport. Thanks for the recommendations as always i find them very helpful.