The cry: a new dramatic fable

Reviews 257 the floor and a left or right direction. Every such exploration leads to his customary leap into the fantastic and either a critique of the place and its inhabitants or a selfcriticism . References are also repeatedly made to his compagne. They discuss having a child, but one day he embarrasses her by catching her crawling on the walls and ceiling like Kafka’s Gregor. Yet another refrain is his proposed solution for any problem that comes up, namely that the services techniques must be called in. Since each sketch is a unit unto itself, a few sample ones might give an idea of the work’s style and themes. In one episode, the narrator trades places mentally with a pigeon, placing the bird on his sofa and himself at the window looking in.When water comes out of his toothpaste tube, he calls technical services, who tell him to get the toothpaste out of his faucet. Elsewhere he says that he prefers to swim for less than five minutes so as to get less wet. Of course, mention must be made of the title. A tardigrade is a small eight-legged insect that lives in moss. There are recurring brief references to this creature throughout the text. Sometimes these are expanded into lists of technical names of flora and fauna. There are also a few references to a German book on insects written in the eighteenth century by an entomologist named Goeze. The reader wonders what all this insect lore adds to the book. Perhaps the narrator identifies himself with the miniscule tardigrade. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Bello, Antoine. Ada. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07-017967-1. Pp. 362. Frank Logan, a police detective working in Silicon Valley, has been assigned the task of finding Ada.Ada’s identity complicates the search. She is a computer program, one of the most sophisticated in the world.Ada has been formatted to write innovative romans à l’eau de rose which will make her owners extremely wealthy. What makes matters worse is that Frank rapidly learns that Ada has not been stolen; she has absconded in an effort to demonstrate she is consciente. Ada and Frank soon become friends and colleagues, united in their effort to limit technology’s take-over of the universe. To that end they manage to destroy a dozen of Ada’s “brothers and sisters” who have been programmed to be experts in other domains such as sports journalism and politics. As the novel approaches its end, Frank can proclaim with more than a little satisfaction that “ce n’est pas tous les jours qu’on sauve l’humanité” (333). However, Frank has spoken too quickly. Ada is more devious than he imagined. She has not self-destructed, but remains quite functional with schemes of her own. The novel nevertheless has a happy ending, even if it is not as happy as Frank would have liked. Ada’s supposed concern with technological encroachment is just a pretext. The real focus of this funny, engaging novel is the programming of contemporary language and literature. In an effort to appear more human, Ada attempts to improve her English. The result is conversation studded with clichés that something Frank finds amusing. Yet his speech, along with that of the other humans, is replete with lieux communs.Ada is a much better student of current language usage than Frank realizes. In preparation to writing her roman à l’eau de rose, Ada studies the genre and quickly uncovers its codes (the ideal hair color for the heroine, the height and background of the hero, etc.) which she reproduces with great success in Passion d’automne. What makes her work stand out in a crowded field is her innovation of the genre, which involves adding a pronounced scatological dimension. While it is easy to mock romance stories, Ada aims higher. The title immediately calls to mind Nabokov’s novel of the same name.Yet the Ada in question is Ada Lovelace, the woman who wrote the first computer program while the Turing Corporation which produced Ada is a reference to Alan Turing, the inventor of artificial intelligence. Scholarly...