🔗 Share this article

During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff preparedness along with jammed safety doors aided the propagation of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas released from combusting laminates caused the loss of 159 people. At first, the disaster was blamed to a traveler—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this individual also died in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the complete facts about the event stayed hidden for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive investigation revealed the fire was likely set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star sequence, the preceding volume, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the street. As the bus moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is taking a piece of him with her. Compelled to repeat the route in pursuit of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is implied that the source of Kurt's discontent may originate in a poor financial decision made on his account by a individual known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

The Devil Book opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator explains her struggle to write T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the task she has set herself and derailed by the pandemic, she approaches the tale indirectly, as a form of allegory. “I came to think / 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 narrative gradually unfolds of a woman who spends quarantine in London with a virtual stranger and during those weeks relates to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she accepted an proposal from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to grant all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. 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.

Another blaze is present: an ardent, compelling dedication to literature as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Exploration

Literature instruct us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not God, and that we enter into them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose early years was marred by abuse and who was placed in a psychiatric hospital, under duress to conform with social expectations or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] understands that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a series of verses to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Literature to Reality

Many British readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower fire, which, though unintentional in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting tragedy and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of putting profit over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a multi-volume sequence, the fire aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a sinister background presence, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of information or inference yet projecting a growing influence over all that occurs. Some readers may doubt how much it is possible to interpret this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply bound into a larger narrative whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

There will be others—and I count myself as among them—who will fall in love with the author's project purely as written art, as properly experimental literature whose ethical and creative intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inseparable. “Compose verses / for we need / that too.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, attractive commitment to the craft as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, wherever it leads.