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    The Enormous Room
    The Enormous Room
    The Enormous Room
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Enormous Room

    Written by E. E. Cummings

    Narrated by Luis Moreno

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives-The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings."-F. Scott Fitzgerald The most notable work of fiction from our most beloved modernist poet, The Enormous Room was one of the greatest-yet still not fully recognized- American literary works to emerge out of World War I. Drawing on E. E. Cummings's experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, this novel takes us through a series of mishaps that led to the poet's being arrested for treason and imprisoned. Out of this trauma Cummings produced a work like no other-a story of oppression and injustice told with his characteristic linguistic energy and unflappable exuberance, which celebrates the spirit of the individual and offers a brave and brilliant opposition in the face of the inhumanity of war. Illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France and featuring an illuminating new introduction by Susan Cheever, this reissued edition offers a unique and multifaceted lens onto the inner life of the poet in his youth and demands recognition by a twenty-first-century readership.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 8, 2015
    ISBN9781490677309
    Author

    E. E. Cummings

    E. E. Cummings was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays.

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    Reviews for The Enormous Room

    3.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I love this book. Cummings knows his way with words... His portrayal is a poem to humanity and a visceral sketch of the man against the stupidity of "the system". But "the system" are, in the end, also individuals and everything reduces to the individual and his personal position in life. I like Cummings writing for what he writes and the way he does it.
    • 4/5
      Cummings' only novel, an autobiographical work about being imprisoned in France during WWI.
    • 1/5
      This is an account of a five months detention in a French prison in1917 because of a mistake. Cummings in this book is young and his future poetic style only bobs up in his prose foreshadowingly. I think he exaggerated the awfulness of onditions in the prison.
    • 4/5
      While volunteering as ambulance drivers during WWI, Cummings and a friend of his ran afoul of the French government as suspicious characters. They were suspicious because they spent more time with the French than with their American compatriots, and because Cummings' friend (referred to in the book as B.) had mentioned rumors of various French plots in his letters home. Cummings' close association with B. was enough to get him hauled in alongside B. when the gendarmes came to collect him.The book proceeds mostly chronologically for the first part, which talks of being sent to various holding facilities and then being gendarme-escorted to the site of the titular Enormous Room at La Ferte Mace (I have no idea how to do accents on the Mac so you'll have to imagine them). Once he's done describing his first day or so there, the narrative shifts to a sort of vignette format, where he talks about his fellow captives and various happenings in their imprisoned lives. He says there was really no other way to do it, as there ceased to be days once he was firmly ensconced there - everything was really just an endless present until the day he was released. He and B. were held for 4 months, at which point B. was sent on to an official prison and Cummings was released to the American embassy and bundled off to America. (His family had at first not known his whereabouts, and then were told he had been lost at sea. Intervention from the American government got him released instead of sent off to a French town to be watched carefully for the rest of the war.)The chronological portion was quite easy reading, but the second part was a little more difficult because of the lack of a clear structure. Cummings likes to use words in his own way - for example, he describes a guard as resembling a rooster and making a sort of "uh-ah" sound as he walks. A few paragraphs later he says, "Behind me the bedslippered rooster uhahingly shuffled." Between that and the copious amounts of French he leaves untranslated in the book, it can occasionally be difficult reading. If you're proficient in the language it would be no problem, of course, but I'm not and I often read away from a computer and easy translation. I had to use my minimal knowledge and whatever cognates I could find to get the gist of some of the conversations. Recommended for: people who hate governments, fans of linguistic flexibility and dry humor, and people who have wondered what it's like to live in a single room with a bunch of men, fleas, and buckets to pee in.Quote (I had a hard time choosing, there were a lot of good ones):"...worst of all, the majority of these dark criminals who had been caught in nefarious plots against the honour of France were totally unable to speak French. Curious thing. Often I pondered the unutterable and inextinguishable wisdom of the police, who -- undeterred by facts which would have deceived less astute intelligences into thinking that these men were either too stupid or too simple to be connoisseurs of the art of betrayal -- swooped upon their helpless prey with that indescribable courage which is the prerogative of policemen the world over, and bundled it into the La Fertes of that mighty nation upon some, at least, of whose public buildings it seems to me that I remember reading: Liberte. Egalite. Fraternite."