🔗 Share this article

In the late night of the 7th of April 1990, a catastrophic blaze broke out aboard the ferry Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry traveling between Frederikshavn and Oslo. Insufficient crew preparedness along with jammed safety doors accelerated the propagation of the flames, while deadly cyanide gas emitted from burning laminates led to the deaths of 159 people. Initially, the tragedy was attributed to a traveler—a lorry driver with a record of fire-setting. Since this suspect too died in the incident and was not able to defend the accusations, the full truth regarding the disaster stayed hidden for many years. It wasn't until 2020 that a comprehensive investigation disclosed the fire was probably set deliberately as part of an insurance fraud.

Asta Olivia Nordenhof's Literary Series: An Overview

Within the initial book of Asta Olivia Nordenhof's epic sequence, the preceding volume, an unnamed narrator is riding on a bus through Copenhagen when she notices an older man on the sidewalk. As the bus moves away, she experiences an “uncanny feeling” that she is carrying a part of him with her. Driven to repeat the journey in pursuit of him, the character enters a landscape that is both unfamiliar and strangely known. She presents readers to a couple named Maggie and Kurt, whose relationship is strained by the burdens of their troubled histories. In the final pages of that book, it is suggested that the source of Kurt's disaffection may originate in a disastrous investment made on his behalf by a man known as T.

This New Volume: An Unconventional Narrative Style

This second installment opens with an lengthy poetic passage in which the writer describes her struggle to write T's narrative. “Within this second volume,” she writes, “we were supposed / to follow him / from youth up until / the night / when he sat anticipating for / the report that / the blaze / on the Scandinavian Star / had successfully been / set.” Burdened by the undertaking she has set herself and disrupted by the global health crisis, 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 sensational story / about entrepreneurs and / the devil.”

A narrative slowly unfolds of a female character who spends lockdown in the UK capital with a virtual stranger and over the course of those days tells to him what happened to her a ten years earlier, when she accepted an proposal from a figure who claimed to be the evil entity to fulfill all her wishes, so long as she didn't doubt his motives. As the elements of the two stories become more interwoven, we begin to believe that they are identical—or at minimum that the identity of T is multiple, for there are demonic forces all around.

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

Pacts and Consequences: A Literary Examination

Literature instruct us that it is the dark figure who makes bargains, not God, and that we engage in them at our peril. But what if the protagonist herself is the malevolent force? A additional narrative eventually emerges—the story of a girl whose early years was scarred by abuse and who was placed in a mental health facility, under duress to comply with societal norms or endure further harm. “[The devil] understands that in the game you've set for it, there are two results: surrender or stay a monster.” A alternative path is ultimately unveiled through a collection of verses to the night that are also a rallying cry against the influences of capital.

Connections and Interpretations: From Fiction to Reality

Numerous UK audience members of Nordenhof's series books will reflect right away of the London tower fire, which, though accidental in origin, shares parallels in that the resulting disaster and fatalities can be attributed at in part to the dangerous trade-off of putting profit over human lives. In these first two books of what is projected to be a multi-volume series, the fire aboard the ferry and the chain of deceptive business deals that culminated in multiple deaths are a ominous underlying presence, revealing themselves only in fleeting glimpses of information or inference yet casting a growing influence over everything that occurs. Certain readers may doubt how far it is possible to read this volume as a stand-alone piece, when its aim and meaning are so deeply bound into a broader whole whose final form, at present, is unknowable.

Experimental Writing: Art and Morality Intertwined

There will be others—and I include myself as one of them—who will become enamored with the author's endeavor purely as text, as properly innovative writing whose ethical and creative purpose are so profoundly interlinked as to make them inseparable. “Write poems / for we require / that as well.” Another kind of blaze exists: a passionate, attractive commitment to writing as a political act. I will persist to follow this literary journey, no matter where it leads.