The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof
The eeriness of the pandemic is evoked in Asta Olivia Nordenhof's formally innovative narrative of an unsettling relationship
In the follow-up to her award-winning novel Money To Burn, Asta Olivia Nordenhof effectively conjures the strange other world of the COVID pandemic. Quarantined in a flat in London with a man she barely knows, a young woman deals with the same sense of quiet unreality that settled over everyone in that time. That, and the fact that she may be carrying the child of her possibly-demonic ex-lover.
The Devil Book’s protagonist tells her tale in an understated, almost matter-of-fact way. It feels like being told a story by a stranger in a bar, one that gets more outlandish by the sentence and yet, for some reason, you can’t help but believe every word.
The main story of The Devil Book is followed by a series of poems, written Bukowski-style in tumbling columns of lower-case text. Much like his own, these verses contain a lot of rage – at patriarchy, capitalism and the other toxic forces poisoning our world. But they’re also full of love, for that same world and how beautiful it should be and could be and still sometimes is. The love burns much brighter than the rage.
In some ways, Nordenhof’s book is a victim of its own success. The narrative portion is so beguiling that you might find yourself longing for more of it, rather than those lovely, thorny poems. But the book as a whole is still an undeniable success: funny and angry, tender and timely.
