The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Published in Finland in 2006. Published in translation in Great Britain in 2013. Published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books on January 20, 2015

Where do writers get their ideas? The Rabbit Back Literature Society provides an amusing answer to the oft-asked question, although in the end it is not an answer that would apply to any writer expect the Society's members -- or, if the answer boils down to "from their imaginations," the answer is obvious. Fortunately, the story that explores that question is far from obvious.

Ella Milana is a literary researcher who wrote her thesis on the mythical aspects of Laura White's children's books. While pondering how to get her career back on track, Ella is working as substitute teacher of Finnish literature in Rabbit Back, the town in which the revered Laura White lives. White determines membership in the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which has not accepted a new member in three decades. At least, not until Ella joins.

The Society's members are the novel's key characters. They most important of them are Marrti Winter, who finds liberation in gluttony; Ingrid Katz, who doubles as the town's librarian; and Aura Jokinen, the housewife who writes sci-fi.

The initial "drama" in this amusing novel stems from Ella's attempt to get to the bottom of a student essay that describes a version of Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov commits his murder with piano wire rather than an axe and is shot dead at the end. Ella finds that the content of other library books has changed. The plot twists after attends a party where "the Laura White incident" occurs, which leads to the bulk of the story.

Membership in the Society involves a commitment to play The Game. It is meant to be a source of inspiration for the writers but is more often a source of torment. The Game gives the story its framework and leads to revelations about a dark secret harbored by the Society's members. Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen plays with the form of a murder mystery as Ella works to uncover the Society's secrets. Her inquiries eventually force her to decide whether to betray the Society by revealing a fact that would shock the literary world -- although the revelation must be reinterpreted by the novel's end.

Ella many theories of life (for example, "all people have an inborn need to make their personalities and ideas known to the world, but as a rule no one is interested in what is going on in anyone else's head") add weight to this amusing novel. In addition to propounding her own theories, Ella learns some vital truths as she plays The Game. The greatest truth is that "we all dress ourselves in stories." We shock ourselves with truths when we are stripped naked of our comfortable inventions. The novel can be read as a primer for writers -- Laura White teaches the Society members the tricks of the trade and Jääskeläinen shares them with the reader -- but it is more deeply a story about the many aspects of human nature and the need to guard against our personal disintegration.

In addition to playing with the form of a mystery novel, Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen less successfully adds elements of a supernatural fantasy novel to the plot. I think the mutating library books are intended to symbolize the shifting nature of reality or our attempt to construct our own realities, but the books, together with a phantom and dogs and bees that harass Winter, a miraculous event in White's young life, and the miraculous nature of her disappearance, just didn't work for me. Ella's efforts to construct the "real" Laura White by playing The Game, on the other hand, provides some clever insights into the ambiguous difference between our stories and our reality. The novel's resolution doesn't resolve every plotline neatly, but it does engage the reader's imagination, which is probably the point.

RECOMMENDED