Behind the book: America's first female serial killer

A deep dive with the people who made MY MEN by Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls.

I’m trying something new at The Frontlist called Behind the Book. Each iteration will feature in-depth conversations with the people who make books happen — from conception to publication.

I’ve always been fascinated by the stories “behind” books — how the idea first struck the author, how they found their agent, what drew their editor to the manuscript, how the story evolved during revisions, and why the final title and cover design were chosen.

Each issue, I’ll speak with authors, agents, editors, publishers, and marketing professionals about all of the above, as well as their creative decisions and challenges.

This week, I spoke with the Norwegian novelist Victoria Kielland, her English translator Damion Searls, and her cover designers Adriana Tonello & Rodrigo Corral about the making of My Men (Astra House, out now).

It’s a brilliant and brooding novel inspired by America’s first female serial killer, Belle Gunness, who murdered at least 14 people in Illinois and Indiana between 1884 and 1908. The first two pages are absolutely stunning, and the story only gets more compelling from there.

Victoria Kielland (author)

How did you first discover Belle Gunness?

A lot of people wonder just that, but the thing is, I don't actually remember exactly. In Norway in the summertime we have something we call, roughly translated: cucumber time. Which means that the newspapers have nothing important to write about in the slow warm summer holiday, so they tend to write and report about random small stuff. I think I read about Belle in one of those fluff pieces, and I do remember thinking: why haven't I heard of this woman before? After that, I found her name and her story everywhere. I spent five years writing the book, and I spent a long time finding the form of how this story could be told without becoming speculative, so I guess my first meeting with her was about eight to ten years ago.

What was your research process like?

It was long and extensive, because when you use a true story and a real person as a starting point, you have to be careful about everything you write, and you have to know all the small details about the world they lived in. Not to use every detail, but when you have those details at your fingertips and a solid overview you can wander around the universe in a much more believable way. Because this is an unbelievable project. And an impossible one, because I can not possibly know what Belle was thinking and feeling. But, for example, I spent a lot of time examining envelopes; she wrote a lot of letters, so I needed to know whether there were self-adhesive envelopes or whether they used varnish and a stamp in the 1890s.

When and where did you write the manuscript, and what was the most difficult part?

I worked full time while I wrote this book, so I have been writing in evenings, weekends, vacations, and holidays. Mostly at the University Library in Oslo. Which is the most amazing building, with huge windows and beautiful light. When I first had to sit indoors most of the time, it was great to get daylight while I was working. 

The most difficult part was to find the rhythm and the focal point of the narrator, and make Belle's psyche believable, which took years. But when I finally found that, the rest mostly wrote itself.

Damion Searls (translator)

What drew you to Victoria's novel?

What interested me is I think what interests anyone who opens the book: the intense, physical, visionary writing. I’d studied Faulkner extensively in grad school, and My Men is one of the only books I’ve come across that instantly reminded me of him, but at the same time it’s written from a very female perspective. I definitely wanted to try to give the book the same power and punch in English.

What were the most important aspects of Victoria's voice for you to capture in translation?

The voice is very striking in Norwegian, too—in fact, Kielland won a Norwegian award given to an author's entire body of work for enriching the Norwegian language, even though she's the youngest ever recipient and My Men is only her first full-length novel. As a translator I have to convey this voice, not smooth things down too much, but I have to do so using the resources of English. There’s a lot of extreme writing—the things Belle sees and feels often don’t make logical sense, and also strain the grammar of Norwegian in ways that can't be strained in English, but a translator has to commit to letting their English be loose or wild or difficult to the same effect. 

An example of what I mean that I've mentioned elsewhere is that Norwegian uses fewer possessive pronouns than English: they’d say “he held out a hand” instead of “he held out his hand,” or “she wiped the leg” instead of “her leg,” or even “there was a pounding in the heart”—that’s just normal, and the meaning is perfectly clear from the context. You usually know whose pounding heart they're talking about. Generally, you just put it into normal English, translating “She brushed the hair from the forehead” as “She brushed her hair from her forehead” or whatever, but Belle doesn't grasp the boundaries between herself and the world very well, and all the thresholds are described oddly, so now we don’t want to simplify everything too much. Sometimes when I asked Victoria a question like “Whose fear is this, Belle’s or her husband’s?” she would say “Both!” Which of course works in Norwegian, and of course in Norwegian she meant both, but in English I still have to decide, because you have to say his fear or her fear, not the fear. Even if Belle is not quite clear whose heart we're talking about, English has to be clearer.

In Belle’s world, there’s “something in the head pressing against the back of the eyes,” or “fear swells in the lungs and rises up into the throat,” or “a prickling settles down in a layer on top of the eyes.” That kind of thing is at least possible in Norwegian, but English starts from a different “normal,” so keeping these constructions literally or directly would be too grotesque and extreme. I didn’t use any of these locutions exactly—as the translator you have to “normalize” the language, which sounds bad and disrespectful to the original, but really you're just expressing things the way English can. If, as a reader, you find the lines powerful and memorable, then they've struck the right balance and they're better and more faithful translations than these literal versions would have been.

What was the most challenging part of this translation?

I don't think Victoria knows this, but I happened to meet several of My Men's translators into other languages, and they all complained about how impossible the book was to translate! I kept hearing that you simply can't say that a prickling settles down in a layer on top of her eyes in French either, or German, or... I think this is a sign that she's not just doing what the Norwegian language usually does. Her poetic power is that what she writes isn't normal or explicable and yet it brings us so deeply into Belle's world. The reader gets to go with that experience; the book isn't difficult, it smoothly brings readers right into Belle's unhinged mindset. But the translator has the additional job of writing sentences in our own language, and we're used to writing things that make more normal sense. This is one of those books that's much harder to translate than to read, not the other way around.

Adriana Tonello & Rodrigo Corral (cover designers)

Could you share some alternate cover designs and tell me why they weren't the right fit?

Originally, we tried an all type version that played off of the original Norwegian cover. Although we added a twist with the shape of the “E” acting as a woman’s face, this approach ended up being too ambiguous given the copy on the cover. We also tried variations of the final cover including one where the background is a darker blue and there’s a gold drop of blood falling from the thumb. However, it was overridden by the chosen cover since this one has the most palpable tension. 

What did you want the cover to convey about the novel?

We wanted this cover to convey the beautiful, prose-like tone and writing of this novel despite its dark subject matter. Although the protagonist is based on the first female serial killer in American history, this fictional account is a surprisingly empathetic take on Belle Gunness’ descent into madness. Our goal was to highlight this dark, yet heartbreakingly visceral journey.    

Why was the final cover design the best choice?

This final cover design was the best choice because it’s impactful, bold, and conveys the artistic writing of the novel. The abstracted hand with its sharp and elongated fingers suggests the presence of something dark, alluding to the “ice-cold” and “corpse-white” hands of Belle’s abusers. In contrast, the bright blue background referencing the novel’s sky motif softens the eerie undertones and encapsulates the comforting, humane moments Belle finds within “the thin blue hours” on her isolating journey.