Adas Raum is a multivalent title which was translated into English as both Ada’s Realm (UK) and Ada's Room (US)—the German “Raum” meaning simultaneously “space” and “realm,” but also quite concretely “room”—just one piece of supporting evidence for comparison’s I’ve recently heard drawn between layers of the novel and Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking essay “A Room of One’s Own.” But Ada—and perhaps Ada’s room—is greater than can be contained by any walls—even if one orbit of the narrative is told from the perspective of the four walls of a room. The novel follows the intersecting lives of four women across more than five hundred years—four Adas—whose lives coalesce around the fate of an ornate, golden bracelet stolen from West Africa by Portuguese colonists in the 15th century and variously reappearing across the centuries in the proximity of young women named Ada. Although each woman’s life runs independently, all four’s fates are intimately entwined with that of the bracelet. Each woman’s life—each search for recognition, retribution, or redemption, becomes part of one greater story—a narrative of resistance and rebirth which is inextricable from the experience of life in the globalized networks of the postcolonial world we all inhabit.
Each woman’s journey is narrated from the perspective of an inanimate object inhabited by a single consciousness unmoored from our human concepts of space and time, an all-but omniscient narrator constrained by the physicality of its earthly form—a broom, a brass doorknocker, a passport book, a room. The limitations of each narrator’s perspective add subtle weight to the power of their narration—suggesting questions which remain unanswered in the novel, carrying over into our present-day understanding of the historical moments in which each narrative loop revolves.