🔗 Share this article Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Latest Analysis: A Scandinavian Literary Sequence Aflame with Intent During the late night of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew training along with malfunctioning safety doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates caused the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this individual too died in the fire and was unable to refute the accusations, the full facts regarding the disaster stayed concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a detailed documentary disclosed the fire was likely set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme. Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Series: An Overview Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the bus drives away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a man referred to as T. This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style The Devil Book opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her struggle to write T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story indirectly, as a type of parable. “I came to think / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about businessmen and / the devil.” A tale slowly emerges of a woman who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those weeks tells to him what occurred to her a decade before, when she agreed to an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils all around. There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration Literature teach us that it is the devil who does deals, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the protagonist herself is the devil? A third storyline comes finally to light—the story of a young woman whose early years was scarred by mistreatment and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to conform with social expectations or endure further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of 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 rallying cry against the forces of capital. Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality Numerous British audience members of Nordenhof's series novels will reflect immediately of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over human lives. In these first two books of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister background presence, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or implication yet casting a deepening shadow over all that transpires. Certain readers may doubt 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 uncertain. Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Intertwined Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as properly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, attractive devotion to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, wherever it leads.