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During the late night of April 7 1990, a catastrophic fire erupted on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry operating between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff training combined with jammed fire doors accelerated the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the loss of 159 people. Initially, the disaster was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of arson. Given that this suspect also died in the fire and was not able to defend himself, the full truth about the disaster stayed concealed for many years. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary revealed the fire was probably set intentionally as part of an fraud scheme.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Sequence: A Glimpse

In the first volume of Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unidentified protagonist is riding on a bus through the Danish capital when she observes an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a piece of him with her. Compelled to retrace the route in search of him, the character finds herself in a setting that is both alien and strangely known. She introduces readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is tested by the burdens of their conflicted pasts. In the concluding section of that volume, it is suggested that the root of the character's discontent may stem from a disastrous investment made on his account by a man referred to as T.

This New Volume: A Unique Approach

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the narrator describes her struggle to compose T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she states, “we were supposed / to trace him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the news that / the blaze / on the ferry / had successfully been / ignited.” Overwhelmed by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the story 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A tale gradually unfolds of a woman who spends quarantine in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days tells to him what happened to her a ten years before, when she accepted an offer from a figure who claimed to be the devil to grant all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his intentions. As the threads of the two stories 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 all around.

There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic dedication to writing as a political act

Pacts and Consequences: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories teach us that it is the devil who makes deals, 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 narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose childhood was scarred by mistreatment and who spent time in a psychiatric hospital, under pressure to comply with social expectations or suffer further harm. “[This entity] understands that in the game you've created for it, there are a pair of results: submit or stay a beast.” A third way out is ultimately revealed through a collection of poems to the night that are simultaneously a rallying cry against the forces of capital.

Parallels and Readings: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous British readers of the author's Scandinavian Star novels will think right away of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, bears similarities in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be attributed at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these first two volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book series, the fire aboard the ferry and the chain of fraudulent business deals that culminated in mass murder are a sinister underlying presence, showing themselves only in brief flashes of detail or implication yet casting a growing influence over everything that transpires. Some readers may doubt how far it is possible to read this volume as a independent work, when its purpose and significance are so deeply tied into a larger whole whose ultimate shape, at this stage, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I include myself as one of them—who will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as written art, as properly experimental literature whose moral and creative intent are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we need / that as well.” There is another fire here: an intense, magnetic devotion to the craft as a political act. I will persist to pursue this literary journey, no matter where it goes.