A review of a magical realist choose-your-own-adventure novel: The Wandering

The devil grants an English teacher (who narrates in the second person) the ability to travel the world with help from a pair of ruby red slippers. What follows is a journey that spans the globe and even beyond it -- New York, Peru, Berlin, a train in the afterlife conducted by Gertrude Stein, and more.

Blending the style of magical realism with the structure of a choose-your-own-adventure, The Wandering is proof that even the most rigid of genres don't don't have to be limiting. The novel uses genre like a tool in order to interrogate existential, reflective, hilarious, and relatable questions about nomadism, agency, the notion of a home, and what travel is like for those who come from the Global South. Myths and fairy tales from a diverse array of inspirations come to life. Hecate makes a regular appearance. The Wizard of Ox and the Indonesian legend of Malin Kundang are relevant in every permutation because of what both stories have to say about leaving and returning home. By connecting these diverse cultural symbols in a story that features so many different types of people, The Wandering proves that the boundaries that divide humanity are completely artificial and perhaps unnecessary. The main character frequently has to deal and interact with those boundaries as she travels (sometimes without a passport), and each time she does, it's clear that those divisions aren't there to benefit humanity as a whole in any meaningful way.

Further emphasizing the subtle polemic against artificial boundaries is the way the separate adventures bleed into one another, making it necessary to read all possible permutations of the story. Much like the narrator, the reader is compelled to wander from one adventure to the next. Even after everything is finished, some questions remain open, leaving space to theorize about what storylines are still availably for exploration. The adventure never ends.

Very quickly, you do have to ask whether "choosing" and "adventure" are really the right terms for what kind of the journey the story is taking you on. The premise is that after feeling restless and stifled, you make a Faustian Bargain that enables you to start traveling, but it isn't really travel. You don't really ever get to be a tourist. Your journey is more akin to what it's like to be an undocumented migrant, which limits what sorts of adventures you get to go on. You have to work. You have to pay rent. You have to apply for visas. Some choices are revealed to be impossible ones, and when you flip to the appropriate page, you are told that you have to change your mind. Other choices are too realistic to feel anything other than deeply existential. If you mess up, you end up subjecting yourself to an unhappy and unfulfilling life forever (or in some cases, you just end up in a surrealist afterlife, trapped forever on a bizarre train full of unsatisfied dead women). If you get it right, you might actually find meaning in your life. With those stakes, the novel understandably induces a certain degree of anxiety.

Although readers are supposed to see themselves as the main character, I also permitted myself an alternative reading. I sometimes felt as though I, an American citizen, was simply making choices that controlled the life of the protagonist, who we are told is a rather average Indonesian woman. I controlled where she went, what she did, and who she loved. It felt like an eerie exaggeration of how the decisions by those in the Global North impact everyone else. She wants to travel, and I'm the one with the authority to determine where. I'm the one who enforces the borders that she keeps coming up against. I am forced to feel directly implicated. Although the book was written initially for an Indonesian audience, I think when reading the English translation, it's fair game to consider this alternative interpretation.