Review | The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha puts the reader in charge
The choose-your-own-adventure tale offers enchanting journeys through myth and folk tale, even if the fantastic options available are limited
The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha (translated from Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein), Harvill Secker. 4/5 stars
Despite their reader-empowering name, choose-your-own-adventure books are more distinguished by the limits placed on the reader’s choice of path than any broad freedom of literary navigation. At most you will have three or four possible paths, and all are bound to lead to the end. What’s more, even though “you” will be the protagonist, typical second-person narration often sounds closer to a series of commands than to the ideal of you the heroine seizing and shaping the storytelling:
“If you want to report your loss to the police, turn to page 25”; “If you want to start a new life in LA, turn to page 352.”
Choose-your-own-adventure stories are not usually aimed at adults, but in the opening of Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering, we first meet “you” having sex with a desperately insecure demon – you rate the experience “nine out of ten”. You realise just how smitten this demon is – you are more seductive than any fallen angel – and you use this to bargain your way to a pair of magical red shoes that will transport you through the genre’s forking adventures and destinations.
And now we begin to know you: you, too, are desperate – desperate to escape the catalogue of mediocrity and failures that is your life, the single path laid out before you. I, the reader, can understand your ambition to leave Jakarta, not to return to Jogja with your parents, to use this enchanted footwear to full effect. I empathise (especially now, with so much of the world under Covid-19 lockdowns) with the fantasy of flying off to New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lima …
The Wandering is a journey through story, and particularly through folk tale and myth, as much as it is from place to place. One of the pleasures of this book is recognising the precise story in which you have landed. It’s a similar pleasure for we grown-ups to the joy of recognition a child may encounter in Shrek.
