ABC News - In a year without travel, this Indonesian author lets you choose your own adventure
By Erin Handley
Posted WedWednesday 24 MarMarch 2021 at 6:48am, updated WedWednesday 24 MarMarch 2021 at 5:42pm
Baca dalam bahasa Indonesia/Read this story in Bahasa Indonesia
The story starts with a pair of red shoes and a deal with the devil. But where it ends is up to reader — sort of.
That's the concept behind Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha's latest novel, The Wandering.
It's been longlisted for the Stella Prize — Australia's book award for women and non-binary authors — which this year features the most diverse array of writers in its eight-year history.
More than half of those longlisted are writers of colour, many of them Asian-Australian. The list is also diverse in form, with works of fiction, non-fiction, essays, young adult novels and short stories making the cut.
Among them, Paramaditha's book is unique — translated from Bahasa Indonesia by Stephen Epstein, it's a 'choose your own adventure' novel, where the reader makes choices that skip them to different pages, taking each on a divergent path.
It's about "the illusion of having choices", Paramaditha told the ABC.
"Because no, you don't really have choices. Actually, everything is sort of predetermined for you."
She's no stranger to wandering herself, having lived in Jakarta, New York and now Sydney.
Her book probes questions of travel and migration, including what it means to be displaced or "in between".
"When you are outside … the story of my people and my culture, it feels invisible," she said.
Readers have described a feeling of FOMO – fear of missing out – that parallels with the experience of travel.
"We're often either emotionally disturbed or feeling that we've passed something, but we didn't really experience it," she said.
Her work is shaped by her own migration and heritage, and the book interweaves fairy tales and Indonesian folk stories, but it also resists stereotypical expectations of books from South-East Asia.
"I wanted to reclaim cosmopolitanism, but from the perspective of the third world, because I feel that we are expected to write in a particular way due to our culture," she said.
"Stories coming from Indonesia are usually expected to have certain elements, for instance, the elements of trauma, and there's some exoticism there, some traditional culture."
Paramaditha said travel writing has often been the realm of white men, and she was interested in the exclusion and privilege of travel – ideas that persist in the era of COVID-19, where virtual mobility and connection are more difficult in some parts of the world.
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