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During the early hours of April 7 1990, a catastrophic fire broke out on board the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Inadequate staff preparedness along with jammed fire doors aided the spread of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from combusting laminates led to the loss of 159 individuals. At first, the tragedy was blamed to a passenger—a lorry driver with a record of fire-setting. Given that this individual also died in the fire and was unable to defend the accusations, the complete facts about the event remained concealed for a long time. Only in 2020 that a comprehensive documentary disclosed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an fraud scheme.

Nordenhof's Literary Series: A Glimpse

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, Money to Burn, an unidentified protagonist is traveling on a public transport through the Danish capital when she notices an elderly man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she feels an “eerie sense” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in search of him, the narrator enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and deeply familiar. She introduces readers to Maggie and Kurt, whose connection is strained by the burdens of their troubled pasts. In the concluding section of that book, it is suggested that the source of the character's discontent may originate in a disastrous financial decision made on his account by a individual referred to as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment begins with an lengthy prose poem in which the narrator explains her challenge to compose T's story. “Within this volume, two,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from childhood up until / the night / when he sat waiting for / the news that / the blaze / on the ferry / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the task she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, she approaches the story indirectly, as a form 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 erotic thriller / about entrepreneurs and / the dark force.”

A tale gradually emerges of a woman who spends lockdown in London with a near-unknown person and over the course of those days relates to him what happened to her a decade earlier, when she agreed to an offer from a man who claimed to be the devil to fulfill all her desires, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the threads of the two stories become more intertwined, we begin to believe that they are one and the same—or at minimum that the nature of T is multiple, for there are devils all around.

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

Deals with the Devil: A Thematic Exploration

Classic stories instruct us that it is the devil who does deals, not a divine being, and that we engage in them at our risk. But suppose the narrator herself is the devil? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose childhood was marred by mistreatment and who spent time in a mental health facility, under pressure to conform with societal norms or suffer more of the same. “[This entity] knows that in the scenario you've set for it, there are a pair of outcomes: surrender or remain a beast.” A alternative path is finally revealed through a series of verses to the darkness that are also a call to arms against the forces of wealth and power.

Connections and Interpretations: From Literature to Real Events

Many British audience members of the author's series books will reflect right away of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which, though accidental in origin, bears parallels in that the resulting disaster and loss of life can be linked at least partly to the devil's bargain of prioritizing profit over human lives. In these initial volumes of what is planned to be a seven-book sequence, the fire on board the ferry and the chain of deceptive business deals that ended in multiple deaths are a ominous background presence, showing themselves only in fleeting flashes of detail or inference yet casting a growing influence over all that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how much it is feasible to read this volume as a stand-alone work, when its purpose and meaning are so deeply tied into a broader whole whose ultimate shape, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Ethics and Aesthetics Fused

Some individuals—and I count myself as one of them—who will become enamored with Nordenhof's endeavor purely as written art, as truly innovative writing whose ethical and artistic purpose are so profoundly entwined as to make them inextricable. “Compose verses / for we require / that too.” There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act. I will continue to pursue this series, wherever it goes.