Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Latest Review: A Danish Literary Sequence Aflame with Purpose

In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a devastating blaze broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient staff training combined with malfunctioning fire doors aided the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from burning laminates led to the deaths of 159 individuals. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of arson. Given that this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the full truth about the disaster stayed concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, Money to Burn, an unidentified narrator is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she feels an “uncanny feeling” that she is taking a part of him with her. Driven to retrace the journey in search of him, the character enters a landscape that is both alien and strangely known. She presents us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the pressures of their troubled histories. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the source of the character's disaffection may stem from a disastrous investment made on his account by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to compose T's narrative. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the fire / on the ferry / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has assigned herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “It occurred to me / that I / can do / anything I want / so this / is my book / this is / for you / this is / an erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale slowly unfolds of a woman who experiences lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and during those days tells to him what occurred to her a ten years before, when she agreed to an offer from a man 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 dual narratives become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils all around.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, compelling commitment to literature as a political act

Deals with the Devil: 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 peril. But what if the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A third storyline eventually emerges—the story of a young woman whose childhood 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. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is finally revealed through a collection of poems to the night that are also a call to arms against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Many British readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will think right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in cause, bears similarities in that the ensuing disaster and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting financial gain over human lives. In these initial books of what is projected to be a seven-book series, the fire on board the ship and the chain of deceptive transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister underlying presence, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of detail or implication yet projecting a deepening influence over all that transpires. Some individuals may doubt how much it is feasible to interpret this volume as a independent work, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as truly experimental literature whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we need / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: an intense, attractive commitment to writing as a political act. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it leads.