In the early 1880s, Brynhild Størset, an impoverished young maid-of-all-work, left Norway for America in search of a new life. After a brief spell living with her older sister Nellie in Chicago, she married a Norwegian man, Mads Sørensen, and killed him. Then she married Peder Gunness, another Norwegian, and killed him too. After Peder, she advertised in the lonely hearts pages for other men and killed them as well – possibly as many as 30 – butchering their bodies and burying the dismembered remains in her yard.
Such are the grisly facts of the life of the woman variously billed as “America’s first female serial killer”, Lady Bluebeard, Hell’s Princess and the black widow of La Porte. Her notoriety has earned her a place in the Guinness World Records and fascinated true crime fans for more than a century. She has inspired ballads and pamphlets and nonfiction books, a couple of films and documentaries, and at least one lengthy novel. Now the Norwegian writer Victoria Kielland has written My Men, a short, sharp shock of a book, and a distinctly fresh take on the story.
In Kielland’s telling, we first encounter the 17-year-old Brynhild with her head “pushed down into the pillow, face-first” by Firstborn, the son of her wealthy employer. Struggling for air and dribbling spit but with a heart that’s “glowing hot”, she confuses her own physical desire with love, only for Firstborn to kick her in the stomach when she tells him she’s pregnant.
Kielland leaves us in no doubt that the assault and miscarriage are scorching psychological wounds from which Brynhild never recovers, but My Men isn’t a forensic unpicking of motive for what comes later. True, we’re introduced to a whole raft of forces – rage, fear, shame, lust, longing, loneliness, an ecstatic belief that she’s carrying out the will of God – all of which seem to be at play in driving Brynhild’s actions and her mental disintegration.
But anyone expecting a slice of Nordic noir will be disappointed. Kielland is less interested in trying to explain causes and effects than in conveying what it might have felt like to be Brynhild – to live in her head and under her skin. The intense, progressively feverish quality of the novel is far closer to the visceral interiority of Clarice Lispector or Jean Rhys than anything by Jo Nesbø or Stieg Larsson.
Though written in the third person, My Men reads for the most part like a desperate, breathless monologue – wildly figurative, elliptical, at times bafflingly opaque: a portrait of a woman who feels the sky clinging to her lungs, grass growing inside her mouth and “the frightened eyes of the birds on her body”. It’s impossible not to think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic The Yellow Wallpaper, which, like My Men, traces a woman’s descent into depression and paranoia and eventually full-blown psychosis. Kielland’s claustrophobic rooms and the world beyond them are strikingly similar to Gilman’s wallpaper: melting, creeping, often stickily yellow.
As she marries and murders first Mads and then Peder, Brynhild changes her name to Bella and then to Belle in a desperate quest to become someone new and start afresh. But her fight to hold on to her sanity is a losing one, and Kielland is brilliant at skewering small everyday moments that, in the depressed mind, can turn into overwhelming despair. When Nellie finds her a job as a seamstress, what seems to be a scene designed purely to foreshadow the killings turns into a moment of moving insight: “How could the cloth be so soft and the scissors so hard? Her eyes were full of tears. Everything swooned and teetered around her.”
It’s not an easy read nor a comfortable one, and it can be exhausting to be in Belle’s head. The same details and images come up again and again, and variations on the italicised question Who are you really? recur a little too often. While the obsessiveness of these patterns is surely part of the point, Kielland walks a tricky tightrope between conveying the truth of Belle’s state of mind and irritating the reader. Still, none of this undermines the raw edge of My Men, a singular novel of unusual power from a fearless and remarkable writer.
• My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls, is published by Pushkin (£14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
