What to Read After a Tryst with the Devil
This title is cursed, but it's not an inaccurate description of the best book I've read in a long time.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my weekly newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here! You can also keep up with me on bookstagram for my latest updates.
If you are receiving this for a second time in your inbox, I’m sorry! Substack is a little finicky for me today.
Hi there. I feel like, with a title like this one, we can skip the pleasantries.
The Book(s)
Some cities move faster than others, forever reminding you to board quickly as they won’t stop for long: a train, a train, you’re looking for a train. But here, you know, you’re going nowhere. You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss.
Are you so in search of adventure that you’re willing to damn the cost, even if it means taking the devil himself as your lover? Read THE WANDERING by Intan Paramaditha (translated from Indonesian into English by Stephen J. Epstein), a choose-your-own-adventure novel that will send you all over the world if you play your cards right. But this beguiling and bewitching book is not all jet-setting and play; it is a book that revels in liminal spaces more than physical ones, and is more interested in what happens while crossing borders than while sightseeing. This is better conveyed by its original Indonesian title, Gentayangan, which “carries more nuance than its English counterpart to also mean ‘haunting, being in between.’” You can spend time in New York or Jakarta or Berlin, to name a few options. But… you only get there after “steamily copulating with Mephistopheles,” you know? So your travels are also cursed, and you witness heartbreak, obsession, disloyalty, poverty, and dissatisfaction in equal measure on each journey. (I, for instance, found myself back in New York several times despite my best efforts to get the hell out of here.) Reading this book is like being lost in a carnival fun house, full of mirrors and distortions and unsettling moments of reflection under the guise of amusement. It’s a hexed and haunted odyssey, but an odyssey nonetheless.
What to Know Going In
Fiction writers can be exasperating, if not exactly cruel. They work hard to create labyrinths, look for easy targets to lure inside, and then sit back and enjoy their victims’ suffering over a cup of coffee and a doughnut.
While there is certainly a beginning to this book, there is no single end. (There are, to my knowledge, around fifteen.) It’s important to know that right at the start, because the “narrative itself becomes a kind of wandering in search of its own sense of completeness.” At one point in the book, you’ll be asked if you have an obsessive enough personality to keep reading. And I do mean you will be asked; the whole book is written from the second person perspective. In response, I started writing down the choices I made each time and tagging branching points in the story with little color-coded post-it flags to ensure I read the tale in its entirety. The book is an example of “fiction at its most untethered, where readers can hurl themselves across time zones, selves and situations, free of risk, danger or discrimination;” perhaps seeking each outcome for the sake of completeness misses the point. Perhaps a more balanced—and serendipitous—reaction is to read the story thread of your choosing, and then simply start again to pick another thread at your leisure.
And these threads have remarkable emotional range. The book’s blend of diverse mythologies, fairy tales, legends, and pop culture references let each thread shimmer with corresponding complexity and depth and humor. From time to time, your devil boyfriend (whom you toy with calling “Beelzebaby,” but settle instead on “Demon Lover”) shows up to derail your tale by telling you how absolutely boring your choices have been. Sometimes he pities you and helps you find another, more exciting, path to take; sometimes he scorns you, leaving you in your own mess. But it’s always a given that you won’t stop traveling for long—something that’s bittersweet for you, the one who made this deal to begin with, who might really have been searching for a home the whole time.
To sample Paramaditha’s prose, you can read her short story “Visiting A Haunted House” in Asymptote. A version of the story was subsequently included as a chapter in The Wandering.
A reminder that Kasey recommended this book to me; her thoughts on the book were included in my newsletter of *your* favorite 2020 reads and convinced me to buy the book immediately.
Tasting Notes
Read this book if you like Netflix’s Russian Doll; tarot readings; the cosmic indifference and irreverent witticisms of Paradise Killer; ghost stories; Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (and magical doors in general); Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man; escape rooms; this app that lets you drive around 40+ international cities and listen to their local radio stations; magical realism; and really cool shoes.
I realize that this is a very…specific kind of book, for a very specific kind of reader. For other reading recommendations, here’s a list of “thrillers spiked with malice and dread” from the New York Times; January 2021 staff picks from Books Are Magic; and the latest edition of “Ask a Book Critic” from Vox.
I’ll see you on the other side, friends.