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In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating blaze broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew training along with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from burning materials led to the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this suspect also perished in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete facts about the event remained concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive investigation revealed the fire was likely started intentionally as part of an insurance fraud.

Nordenhof's Literary Series: A Glimpse

In the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star series, the preceding volume, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a bus through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the bus drives away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the route in search of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the source of the character's discontent may stem from a poor investment made on his account by a man referred to as T.

The Devil Book: An Unconventional Narrative Style

The Devil Book begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator describes her challenge to compose T's story. “In this volume, two,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she tackles the story indirectly, as a type 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 erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a female character who experiences quarantine in London with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she accepted an proposal from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe 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, compelling commitment to writing as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who does deals, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? 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 comply with social expectations or endure more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Connections and Interpretations: From Literature to Real Events

Many British audience members of Nordenhof's series books will reflect right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in cause, shares similarities in that the ensuing tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over people. In these initial books of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze aboard the ship and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying element, showing themselves only in brief flashes of information or inference yet casting a deepening shadow over all that occurs. Some readers may doubt how far it is possible to interpret The Devil Book as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger whole whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose moral and creative intent are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a statement. I will persist to pursue this literary journey, wherever it goes.