🔗 Share this article

During the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic fire broke out aboard the MS Scandinavian Star, a passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff training combined with malfunctioning fire doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the loss of 159 people. At first, the disaster was attributed to a traveler—a truck driver with a history of arson. Since this suspect also died in the fire and was not able to defend himself, the complete facts regarding the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the blaze was likely set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star Sequence: An Overview

In the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed narrator is riding on a public transport through Copenhagen when she observes an elderly man on the street. As the vehicle moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Compelled to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character finds herself in a landscape that is both alien and deeply familiar. She introduces us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the pressures of their troubled pasts. In the final pages of that volume, it is implied that the source of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a poor financial decision made on his behalf by a individual known as T.

The Devil Book: A Unique Approach

The Devil Book opens with an extended poetic passage in which the narrator describes her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the pandemic, she tackles the story obliquely, as a type of allegory. “I came to think / that I / can do / whatever I want / so this / is my work / this is / for you / this is / an sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a woman who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what occurred to her a decade earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a man who professed to be the evil entity to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the elements of the two stories 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 multiple, for there are demonic forces everywhere.

Another blaze is present: a passionate, compelling commitment to literature as a form of activism

Deals with the Devil: A Literary Exploration

Literature teach us that it is the dark figure who does deals, not a divine being, and that we enter into them at our peril. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A third storyline comes finally to light—the account of a girl whose childhood was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with social expectations or endure further harm. “[This entity] knows that in the game you've created for it, there are two results: surrender or remain a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a collection of verses to the darkness that are also a rallying cry against the influences of wealth and power.

Parallels and Interpretations: From Literature to Real Events

Many UK audience members of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star books will think right away of the London tower tragedy, which, though unintentional in origin, shares similarities in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be attributed at in part to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over people. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the blaze aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a ominous background presence, showing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or implication yet casting a growing influence over all that transpires. Some individuals may doubt how far it is possible to read The Devil Book as a independent piece, when its aim and meaning are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is uncertain.

Innovative Prose: Ethics and Aesthetics Intertwined

Some individuals—and I count myself as among them—who will become enamored with the author's project purely as text, as truly experimental writing whose moral and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, attractive devotion to the craft as a statement. I intend to continue to pursue this literary journey, wherever it leads.