The Straits Times: Don the Devil's shoes and pick your own path
THE STRAITS TIMES
MAY 12, 2020, 5:00 AM SGT
Grown-up, globetrotting take on Choose Your Own Adventure books has 15 endings and took nine years to write
Arts Correspondent
"All those girls/who wore the red shoes/each boarded a train that would not stop," reads the poem The Red Shoes by Anne Sexton. "Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop." Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go wandering.
In Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha's debut novel, The Wandering, the narrator puts on a pair of magical red shoes gifted by the Devil, which lets the wearer wander the world - but will not let her stop.
This is a choose-your-own adventure novel told in the second person. The choices the reader makes from page to page dictate where the narrator ends up, be it a cemetery in Berlin, the red-light district of Amsterdam, the Tijuana border or somewhere else.
It took Paramaditha, 40, nine years and a large map to write the novel, which has 15 different endings.
"When you travel or go on a journey, you always ask yourself: What if I had taken that path and not this path?" she says over Skype from Sydney, where she lectures on media and film studies at Macquarie University.
"The novel lays out parallel realities where you can see different versions of yourself making decisions
"It gives the sense of freedom, but you're not really free - all these options have been made for you by the author.
"It's the same thing when we travel. Our options are already predetermined by certain structures such as class, nationality, passport and whether you are travelling as a woman or a man."