“The Howling Miller” is the most unexpected, most sadly tender novel written by the Finnish writer Arto Paasilinna. It’s no accident that the novel has been translated into 23 languages and adapted for film. In a Lapland village, after the war, Gunnar Huttunen arrives. He buys and then repairs a watermill. And everything, it seemed, is going well. But Gunnar, with his strange temperament and habit of howling at night when things feel especially lonely, irritates the neighbors. “Be a person!” “Be like everyone!” they tell him from all sides. Finally, the miller is committed to an insane asylum. And then the events unfold in such a way that you can no longer say for sure who in the novel’s story is insane and who is normal.