Translated material
With tickets and a hare
It so happened that a collection of essays by Alain de Botton, printed on newsprint as a bonus to the Afisha-Mir magazine, became almost the most current hit of this summer, so many of my friends specially bought packs of this “World” in order to take out from plastic packaging the treasured blue book.
Botton is somehow unfairly called a pop philosopher, the creator of the “philosophical Ikea” and even a charlatan who discredits thought by mixing Montesquieu with a romance novel. In fact, the charm of this London-based Zurich native is that Botton is not at all afraid to tread into the territory of naked banality. The essence of his simple method is the adaptation of high-quality analytical tools to unremarkable everyday situations. A primitive lunchtime quarrel over a portion of creme brulee cake, seasoned with ironic remarks and de Botton’s ruthless reflection, rises in the reader’s eyes to the heights of Platonic dialogues. Botton is not afraid to express out loud and exaggerate for a long time the simplest thoughts that have occurred to even the most ignorant reader at least once. And while this grateful reader squeals with the joy of recognition, the cunning author screws him with a couple more passages as an additional intellectual load.
“The Art of Travel” is concocted precisely according to this principle. And if you are asked what to take with you as travel reading, you can safely recommend this pocket book - you won’t be disappointed. Simple considerations (about the fact that the anticipation of travel always exceeds reality, that people abroad are surprised more readily and more often, that nature awakens a sense of the sublime, and airports provoke nostalgia and peace) come in handy on the road. In addition, for any reason, Botton seeks support from his more eminent colleagues: Huysman gathers the reader on the road, Baudelaire and Hopper help to overcome the adversities of travel, von Humboldt offers the services of a guide, and William Wordsworth sends everyone off to the bosom of nature. The topography of “The Art of Travel” is no less extensive than its literary component. Alain de Botton briskly rushes between London and Barbados, from Madrid he moves to Amsterdam, tired of the cities, he moves to the Lake District to end his wanderings in Provence. Under the sound of wheels, Botton's leisurely and soporific passages about the fact that it is impossible to be one hundred percent present in any place on earth, that only on a train can you meet yourself alone, that the anticipation of the journey is its most pleasant component - these pleasant platitudes resonate comfortably with their own dreams of a new place, a different life and never-before-seen landscapes.
And if the search for happiness is a defining component of our lives, then it is travel that most clearly shows the dynamics of this process in all its tension and contradictions. Travel, albeit vaguely, expresses our ideas about what life consists of beyond the framework of daily work and the struggle for survival . So it turns out that “The Art of Travel” is a book about the search for happiness and about the ephemerality of the dream of the existence of some other form of life besides one’s own.
Arto Paasilinna. Year of the hare. Translation from Finnish by Ilya Uretsky. M.: Olga Morozova Publishing House. 2006.
Arto Paasilinna is a venerable and honored writer; “The Year of the Hare” was released in Finland back in the mid-70s, but somehow it never made it to Russia. Although the main character of the novel, journalist Vatanen, ends his adventures precisely on the territory of the former USSR, violating the state border in pursuit of a polar bear that bit him in the stomach. In general, Arto Paasilinna’s dispassionate intonation and deliberately primitive syntax will remind readers of the fashionable style of “new naivety” or “new sincerity.” Paasilinna's closest geographical epigon is the popular Norwegian Erlend Lu, whose recent novel “Doppler” looks like an exact copy of “The Year of the Hare.”
In the Norwegian version, a young clerk, exhausted from work and endless worries about arranging his life, falls off his bicycle and hits his head on a random snag, after which he runs away from civilization and fraternizes with a young moose. In the Finnish original, a successful metropolitan journalist exchanges his wife, home and job for the troublesome patronage of a hare wounded as a result of an accident, in whose company he goes traveling around Finland. On the road, the hero meets fellow human beings in the form of veterinarians, police officers, fishermen and even former intelligence officers, finds himself in various comic stories and in the end finds what, in fact, the whole campaign was started for - peace and freedom. For the sake of such a simple message, perhaps it wouldn’t be worth fussing over, but the main thing in Paasilinna’s novel is not morality at all, but the inimitable intonation, thanks to which any small event (for example, drawing a plant called “meadow china” on a piece of paper) balances on the edge of common sense and some kind of primordially northern, wild and direct, like a tank, absurdity.