Arriving in northern Finland after World War II to purchase a dilapidated mill, the eccentric Gunnar Huttunen is feared and reviled by local villagers because of his habit of nighttime howling and they soon force him out of local society and into the role of a hermit in the nearby forest. Original.
When Gunnar Huttunen turns up in a small village to restore a dilapidated mill, its inhabitants are instinctively wary. He's big. He's a bit odd. And he's a stranger. Everyone loves his brilliant animal impressions but these feelings soon sour when he starts to howl wildly at night. And once the mean-spirited, small-minded locals realise Gunnar won't conform, they conclude he must be mad. Hounded from his mill and persecuted for being different, only the love of his life and the local drunk stand by him. Can he survive? And how? The Howling Miller is a modern fable that is both beautifully written and strangely moving.
Arriving in Northern Finland after the Second World War, Gunnar Huttunen buys a dilapidated mill on the Suukoski rapids of the Kemijoki River. An Ignatius Reilly of the Finnish 1940s, Gunnar is an eccentric outsider swimming against society’s current. Prone to rapid mood swings and a general lack of decorum, he is feared and reviled by village notables for his wayward manner most noticeably his indulgent nighttime howling, which he gets up to when he ?feels the need to do something special,” and to which he is joined in delirious chorus by the local dogs.
The miller’s situation rapidly spirals out of control. Gunnar is cast out of society, the villagers become his jailors and the forest his prison. A miller without a mill, Gunnar is forced to assume a hermit’s lifestyle. At once a tale of conformity and the consequences of its antithesis, The Howling Miller paints a crystalline portrait of society, its norms, and what it means to function outside of them. This is a tour de force tale told with verve, humor, and a sense of the bizarre.
