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During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the deaths of 159 people. At first, the tragedy was attributed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Given that this individual also died in the fire and was not able to refute the accusations, the full facts about the disaster stayed concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the blaze was probably set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: An Overview

In the initial book of Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to repeat the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She presents us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a poor investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy poetic passage in which the narrator explains her struggle to compose T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a form of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and over the course of those weeks relates to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an offer from a figure who professed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: an ardent, magnetic dedication to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was marred by abuse and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to comply with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've set for it, there are two results: surrender or remain a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a series of verses to the night that are also a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many British readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will think immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, shares parallels in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two books of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister background element, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or implication yet projecting a growing shadow over all that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how much it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a independent work, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose ethical and creative intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, attractive devotion to writing as a political act. I will continue to follow this literary journey, no matter where it leads.