The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna (1981)

What a fine thing this book is: by turns gutsy, fantastical and blackly funny. This story of a man in 1950s Finland who is, in today's parlance, probably bipolar, twists and turns in a delightful way. Huttunen is a miller by trade, and he has experienced Finland's strange and emotionally devastating gallop through the Second World War. There is mention early on of his wife dying in a fire somewhere in southern Finland which, with his sensitivities, could easily have further destabilised an already tense personality, let alone what the privations of the war may also have brought out. He heads north to the top of the gulf of Bothnia and a fairly backwoods region to start again, and finds a mill he can get working easily nearby a scanty village, surrounded by forest, swamp, and wild rivers. But his emotional pressures come out in uneasy ways, the most notable of which is a tendency to howl. He sounds convincingly wolf-like and scares the limited locals. Whilst they are warily welcoming to begin with, the howling and the extremities of his behaviour soon begin to tell in the opposite direction. A couple of the locals are a little more understanding, in particular a police constable, Portimo, and a "horticulture advisor", Sanelma Kayramo. She's a classic 50s Scandinavian creation: in an age of communal activity, and top-down jollying along to a better life, the Finnish state served up to its people admonitions and cheery encouragement in the bodies of these "advisors" of the better way. But she's also young, gorgeous, and very taken with Huttunen! This new personal war between the miller and his adopted locale takes some fantastic turns as he battles with pompous locals, bears with their prejudices pretty unwillingly, gets sent to a mental hospital, escapes to the woods and sets up camp, survives wild-man style. Our sympathy is always with him, but we can also see where he could have handled trouble a lot more diplomatically! There's also some brilliantly funny commentary on the lazy, deceitful, self-obsessed villagers, and some wacky situations arise where everything tumbles at cross-purposes. What a quiet, tongue-in-cheek, sly thing Paasilinna is - it's a wonder to me that more effort hasn't been made to render him into English, if this and it's only anglo compatriot, the classic The Year of the Hare are anything to go by - the French have a good twenty titles to choose from. Here's hoping the fresh English translations roll in soon.