The Devil Book Review: A Scandinavian Literary Sequence Aflame with Purpose

In the early hours of April 7 1990, a devastating fire erupted on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Oslo and Frederikshavn. Insufficient crew preparedness combined with jammed fire doors aided the propagation of the fire, while deadly hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates caused the loss of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a truck driver with a history of fire-setting. Since this individual also died in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the complete facts about the event remained hidden for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the blaze was probably started deliberately 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 protagonist is traveling on a bus through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the vehicle moves away, she experiences an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to repeat the journey in search of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces us to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their conflicted histories. In the final pages of that volume, it is suggested that the source of the character's disaffection may originate in a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book begins with an extended prose poem in which the writer explains her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the report that / the blaze / on the ferry / had effectively been / ignited.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a type of parable. “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 businessmen and / the dark force.”

A narrative gradually emerges of a female character who experiences lockdown in the UK capital with a near-unknown person and during those weeks tells to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an offer from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to suspect that they are identical—or at minimum that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils everywhere.

There is another fire here: a passionate, compelling commitment to literature as a political act

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who does deals, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But what if the narrator herself is the devil? A additional storyline comes finally to light—the story of a young woman whose early years was scarred by abuse and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[The devil] understands that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a series of poems to the night that are also a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Connections and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's series novels will think 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 attributed at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the series of fraudulent transactions that ended in multiple deaths are a sinister background presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet projecting a growing influence over all that occurs. Certain individuals may doubt how much it is feasible to read The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately tied into a broader narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as properly innovative literature whose moral and artistic intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, magnetic devotion to writing as a statement. I intend to persist to follow this literary journey, no matter where it goes.