Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Latest Review: A Scandinavian Literary Sequence Burning with Intent

During the early hours of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while toxic cyanide gas released from burning materials caused the deaths of 159 people. At first, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect too died in the fire and was unable to refute himself, the full facts about the event remained concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was probably started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a public transport through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle drives away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the burdens of their conflicted histories. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's discontent may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his behalf by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the narrator explains her challenge to write T's narrative. “In this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the evening / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she tackles the tale indirectly, as a form of allegory. “I came to think / 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 devil.”

A narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who experiences lockdown in London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she agreed to an proposal from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who does bargains, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood was marred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to conform with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of results: surrender or remain a monster.” A third way out is finally unveiled through a series of poems to the night that are simultaneously a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many UK readers of Nordenhof's series novels will reflect immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the ensuing tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in brief glimpses of detail or implication yet casting a deepening shadow over all that transpires. Certain readers may doubt how far it is feasible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone work, when its aim and significance are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at this stage, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with the author's endeavor purely as text, as properly innovative writing whose moral and creative intent are so deeply interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, wherever it leads.