The Indonesian author’s novel The Wandering allows readers to select their own path – but follows characters whose lives have often been decided for them.

‘Travel is an ancient desire’ … Intan Paramaditha.

“Onism”, according to John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (an online “fictionary” for ineffable feelings), is “the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die – and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.”

Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha’s recent book The Wandering, a socially observant choose-your-own adventure novel, is the epitome of onism. Structured like one of the Choose Your Own Adventure series from the 1980s and 90s that Paramaditha read as a child, this novel is no gimmicky remake or nostalgic paean. Instead, Paramaditha adapts the form to serve her subject matter: travel, around which she draws questions of mobility, agency and representation into orbit.

The Wandering is a novel more interested in the offcuts, in what – and who – get left behind in stories of travel. “We are always haunted by the question of not choosing the other path, the road not taken,” Paramaditha says. “Travelling is always about making choices, but at the same time your choices are made for you, structured by many things: nationality, class, gender, what we can access and what not. We’re walking on a map that already exists and our location on the map has been decided.”

In order to fit into certain ideals, you need to mutilate yourself Paramaditha’s current location is Sydney, where she lives with her partner and daughter and lectures on media and film studies at Macquarie University. “I grew up in the 90s in Jakarta as a third-world teenager, and for me, travel was unattainable,” she says. “I thought America only existed on TV!” If travel eluded her as a child, it has shaped her reality as an adult. On finishing her BA in Indonesia, she won a Fulbright scholarship to California before completing her PhD at NYU and moving to Australia several years later. For the most part, she keeps her writing and academic selves separate; she writes her novels in Indonesian, her academic work in English. “So here the reader is in a way interpolated …” she begins one answer, before interrupting herself, “I hate that word!”

The Wandering is Paramaditha’s second book to be translated into English. Her first, Apple and Knife (both translations are by Stephen J Epstein, with whom Paramaditha works closely), is a phantasmagorical collection of short stories and reimagined tales, not unlike Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado. In The Wandering, the Dorothy-esque protagonist receives a pair of cursed red shoes from a demon lover – but it is not only Oz she is evoking. Her source of inspiration is Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Red Shoes, in which a young girl finds herself trapped by dancing footwear. To escape their control, she is forced to have her feet amputated, just as Cinderella’s stepsister – who also appears in one of Paramaditha’s stories in Apple and Knife – cuts off her toe to fit into a different but equally fateful pair of shoes. “In order to fit into certain ideals, you need to mutilate yourself,” Paramaditha says.

As a child, she was surrounded by books (“I grew up as a nerd”) and is now as comfortable discussing Shakespeare and The Wizard of Oz as she is Indonesian folk tales, which are rich with tales of travel. “Travel is an ancient desire,” she says. “The Odyssey is about travel, the Mahābhārata is about travel and in Indonesia we have this song called Our Ancestors Are Sailors.” But for Paramaditha, travel stories are dominated by the western perspective: she laments the hegemony of Eat, Pray, Love-style stories that suggest “self-discovery is achieved through consumption and financial independence”, with Indonesia and its “bare-breasted Balinese woman, exotic paintings, Bali, Ubud and the whole yoga thing” being reduced to a “place travelled”, as opposed to a point of departure.

Paramaditha’s travellers in The Wandering are not just privileged globetrotters, but undocumented migrants living in New York, refugees in Europe, people wandering the spice routes. “It’s a different trajectory from the version of cosmopolitanism that’s dominant in the media, where it’s all about exposure to other cultures through consumption,” she says.

The Wandering was published in Indonesia in 2017, under the title Gentayangan. It translates directly as “wandering” but the Indonesian word contains numinous tones that the English equivalent lacks. Paramaditha says it describes “the wandering state of spirits, spirits who are no longer with us in our world but have not crossed over to the world of the dead. They occupy this liminal space.”

With its choose-your-own adventure structure, The Wandering is fiction at its most lifelike, presenting the reader with choices and inevitable misgivings – in other words, onism. It is also fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination.

Speaking to Paramaditha in Sydney from London, I am struck by our own state of shared gentayangan, our words travelling from night to day, from winter to summer. As for her own gentayangan, she splits herself between her academic work, her writing, and her involvement in feminist groups in Indonesia. By design or necessity, Paramaditha has arrived at a worldview that oscillates between free will and cultural determinism, with multiplicity at its root. “We can decide where to go but we’re not really free,” she says. “I like having this idea of multiple selves and multiple circumstances. Because that’s what we are.”

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J Epstein, is published by Harvill Secker.