Fiction – Kindle edition; Pushkin Press; 224 pages; 2023. Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.
My Men by Victoria Kielland is a fictionalised account of the life of Belle Gunness, America’s first female serial killer, who emigrated from Norway in the late 19th century and was thought to have murdered 14 men in rural Indiana.
Her story is told in the third person, but the writing has such a visceral and urgent quality that it feels like a first-person narrative.
In her head
From the first page, the reader is plunged right into Belle’s teenage head and then taken on an opaque, almost impossible-to-pin-down journey that follows her from rural Norway — where she was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in 1859 — to Chicago, where she lived with her sister for a short time under the name Bella. She later married a farmer, Mads Sørensen, and changed her name to Belle. She became Mrs Gunness when she wed her second husband Peter Gunness in 1902.
The novel refrains from going into detail about the murders she committed — indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to even realise this is what the book is about — and there’s no exploration of her motivations or reasons for killing so many men. (If you check out her Wiki page she made a habit of luring men to her home via marriage ads, then dismembering their bodies and burying them on her property.)
But in creating a relentless portrait of Belle’s inner life — which is mainly full of shame and fear, loneliness and lusty thoughts — we get a glimpse of what’s going on in her head. And we can see that she uses her sexual agency to get what she wants. But it wasn’t always like that.
No obvious answers
The reader can see that the seeds were sown when Belle was a teenage girl working on a farm in Norway.
Here, she fell in love with the landowner’s son with whom she carried out an illicit relationship. When she reveals she has fallen pregnant to him, he brutally kicks her in the stomach. It was this unwanted pregnancy and the way in which her lover so cruelly treated her that precipitated her move to America.
The psychological damage of this traumatic event acts as a driver for all that follows. It’s clear, to this reader at least, that the murders were Belle’s way of avenging (over and over) the way her first lover had crushed her heart and spirit.
My Men isn’t an easy book to read, or like. It’s not a forensic examination of the crimes, it’s more an experimental look at what it might be like to walk in Belle’s shoes, to feel what she feels, to experience what she experiences and to live in her head for just a short while.
It was unpleasant and made me feel uncomfortable throughout, and when I came to the end I just felt grubby, like I’d been rubbernecking a fatal car accident. For a book to get under the skin like this, I think it’s fair to say it made an impact — and perhaps, in the end, that’s all the author really wanted to do…
If you liked this, you might also like:
‘See What I Have Done’ by Sarah Schmidt: the fictionalised account of the American Lizzie Borden murder case in which she was tried and acquitted of the axe murders of her father and stepmother in 1892.
‘Alias Grace’ by Margaret Atwood: the fictionalised story of a teenage maid, Grace Marks, who was found guilty of the brutal murder of her employer and his mistress in 19th century Canada.