Asta Olivia Nordenhof continues to shake her fist at capitalism in The Devil Book (2023, tr: Caroline Waight, 2025), the second volume in her Scandinavian Star septology. In Money To Burn (2020, tr: Caroline Waight, 2025), we followed a couple called Kurt and Maggie, their interpersonal power dynamic, and the greater systems in play around them. In its conclusion, Kurt receives an opportunistic phone call, from someone named T, inviting him to invest in a doomed ferry business, one which we know to be the Scandinavian Star, deliberately burned in 1990 as part of an insurance scam.
Any continuation of that narrative is instantly dismissed as, in a foreword of free and terse verse, Nordenhof discusses the issues of telling T’s life story when, if saying he would kill for profit, there’s little else to say about him. The Devil Book is therefore its own thing (“an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil”). Helpfully – or unhelpfully – she adds “it will be your job / to make it fit / into the series.”
Where the first installment’s narrator went unnamed, this time we have the name Olivia, which puts us squarely into autofiction territory. The aforementioned businessmen are T, who offers her a job away from the brothel she works in, and, over ten years later, an unnamed host who, following a chance meeting, invites her to spend time in his high-rise apartment in London. This being at the height of Covid means she would have to spend two weeks quarantining; the perfect situation in which to write her book about T.
Nordenhof’s narrative continues, casual and chatty, its chapters marked by the days, flitting between the time in the apartment and her time with T. Both situations, unusual as they are, see the men in powerful positions, offering her everything she needs. Money is the culprit, the dynamics unbalanced between those it liberates and those isolated for the lack of it. But her suggestion that T may be the Devil, a personification of mammon, adds a lightly metaphysical touch. The story of Goethe’s Faust, which she discovers, seems to align with her own.
But this account, titled The Devil in a High-Rise, is just one of ‘Four Attempts to Answer the Question of Whether It Is Possible to Love under Capitalism’. Others (Open Houses and Winter Cabin) continue the foreword’s poetic style, while between them sits The Devil Speaks from the Madhouse, an account of her time receiving therapy. The poems, while often more blunt than the prose, feel somewhat opaque with moments of hard-hitting clarity. As a combination, they return to Money To Burn’s anger at the structures built by a capitalist society, this time at the value ascribed to a life, an actuarial coldness that can presume to calculate the value of a person in care or the compensation of a loved one.
Although the first ‘attempt’ is both the longest and most engaging, the story sparkles with pain and anger as it probes love (sexual, parental) and attempts to sustain it within existing frameworks. When Olivia decides to “castrate the narrative arc”, it’s as much to the story being told as it is to the symbiosis of capitalism and patriarchy. In one poem she writes “there is nothing made / we can’t unmake / if we want to and / there are enough of us”, but doesn’t provide a replacement for a dismantled capitalism. And, if nothing, then whether love is also possible in that vacuum.
Despite its succinct anger, I think I preferred Money To Burn over The Devil Book. This second volume, with its more experimental pieces, is a more challenging stepping stone to whatever conclusion Nordenhof has planned and its poetry’s more ponderous moments are less engaging. It’s obviously a book that rewards rereading as its ideas bubble away and the dialogue between its sections finds greater clarity with each exploration. That is to say, the devil is in its details. But one can only truly judge its place in the series when all seven titles are available for that greater dialogue.
