Featuring Laura Vazquez, Eduardo Halfon, Ian Bostridge, and More
Mark Haber’s Ada begins largely how it ends (no spoilers): Gerard Desacroux IV, the impish, recently-made-ruler of a small fiefdom in a region—Saxony or Bavaria, he doesn’t know—paces endlessly (“the only solution to the dilemma of being alive”) while he awaits an imminent arrival. Is it the uprising of the peasants on his land, lead to extremis by Desacroux throwing them into needless and inevitably deadly battles against his neighbor? The Hapsburg Inspector General, the equivalent of the food inspector darkening the doorway of a scummy restaurant? Or Ada, the focus of Desacroux’s ardor and obsession after a rapturous night five years prior?
Though the slim volume takes place over the course of several hours, Desacroux, pacing in his “Great Room,” between paeans to Ada and his father, and hurled abuse at his servants, gives us the rough outline of his entire life. It is a Modernist move, to be sure, but Ada is more aligned with Tristram Shandy, Monty Python, even Roberto Benigni in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. Butlers are kicked in the shins and told their children are ugly; a patriarch’s idiotic military decisions are venerated for their spirit; blood spilling out of a servant’s wound is more an issue for the rug. In short, Ada is an absurd romp.
