🔗 Share this article

During the late night of April 7 1990, a devastating fire broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff training along with jammed safety doors accelerated the spread of the fire, while deadly cyanide gas released from burning laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect also died in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the full facts regarding the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a detailed investigation revealed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic series, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is traveling on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus drives away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the narrator finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the narrator explains her challenge to compose T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the story indirectly, as a form of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who spends lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days tells to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who professed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't question his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the nature of T is legion, for there are devils all around.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, magnetic dedication to literature as a form of activism

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the account of a young woman whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are two results: submit or remain a monster.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a collection of poems to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous UK readers of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect immediately of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in cause, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over people. In these initial books of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a ominous background element, revealing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet casting a growing influence over everything that occurs. Some individuals may question how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as text, as truly experimental literature whose moral and creative intent are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this series, no matter where it leads.