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During the late night of April 7 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out on board the MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient staff preparedness combined with malfunctioning fire doors aided the spread of the fire, while toxic hydrogen cyanide gas emitted from combusting materials led to the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was attributed to a passenger—a truck driver with a record of fire-setting. Given that this individual also perished in the incident and was not able to refute himself, the full facts regarding the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: An Overview

Within the first volume of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unnamed protagonist is traveling on a bus through the Danish capital when she notices an older man on the street. As the vehicle moves 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 narrator enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She presents us to Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is tested by the pressures of their conflicted pasts. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the root of Kurt's disaffection may stem from a disastrous investment made on his account by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Approach

This second installment opens with an lengthy prose poem in which the writer describes her challenge to compose T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she states, “we were meant / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the fire / on the Scandinavian Star / had effectively been / set.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and derailed by the global health crisis, she tackles 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 entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale slowly emerges of a woman who spends quarantine in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and during those weeks tells to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a man who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't question his intentions. As the elements of the dual narratives become more intertwined, we begin to suspect that they are one and the same—or at the very least that the identity of T is legion, for there are devils everywhere.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Examination

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who makes bargains, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the protagonist herself is the devil? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to comply with social expectations or endure further harm. “[The devil] knows that in the scenario you've created for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A alternative path is ultimately revealed through a series of verses to the darkness that are simultaneously a call to arms against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Real Events

Many UK readers of Nordenhof's Scandinavian Star novels will think immediately of the London tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, shares similarities in that the resulting tragedy and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the dangerous trade-off of prioritizing financial gain over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is projected to be a seven-book sequence, the blaze aboard the ferry and the series of deceptive transactions that ended in mass murder are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet projecting a deepening shadow over all that occurs. Certain individuals may doubt how far it is feasible to read this volume as a independent piece, when its purpose and significance are so intricately bound into a larger narrative whose ultimate shape, at present, is uncertain.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Fused

There will be others—and I count myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as text, as truly innovative literature whose ethical and artistic intent are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Write poems / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to writing as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, wherever it goes.