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The Enormous Room

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The Enormous Room

By: E. E. Cummings
Narrated by: Luis Moreno
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About this listen

In 1917, young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy. Under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room, his account of his four-month confinement, is like a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his existence: to lose everything is to become free, and so to be saved.

Public Domain (P)2015 Recorded Books Classics Fiction Genre Fiction War & Military Inspiring

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This was American modernist poet (and painter) e e cummings’ first book and it is, in the main, quite different from his challenging poetry. It is not, in a formal sense, modernist (it was published the same year as James Joyce’s far more experimental and exciting “Ulysses”) but it does go against convention inasmuch as it tells a fairly grim story of Cummings’ own imprisonment in an Allies’ (French) prison on spurious charges. It isn’t so much that his five months in prison tends towards a Kafkaesque story of hostile bureaucracy but that his time in the “enormous room” with an unpromising group of prisoners brings a kind of freedom. He leaves prison thinking he has been “peculiarly fortunate” to have met the people he met in prison. / The novel/account ends intriguingly, given that a year later his first book of poetry, “Tulips and Chimneys”, was published. On the trans-Atlantic voyage home, the ex-prisoner, emboldened by his prison insights, starts to sound like a modernist poet: his writing become quite staccato and syntactically unusual: “The biggest afloat in the world boat”, he writes. Also, the narrative ends with a brief vision of New York, “the incomparably tall city”, the city that, two decades later, would supplant Paris as the preeminent modernist city.

“Peculiarly fortunate”

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Although i thought "The Enormous Room" was very good i know that i would have enjoyed it far more if i was able to understand the French language.As i listened to the Audible rendering i also read the story on my PocketBook.A person that is able to read and talk the French language will i expect get more from this rendition than i, as there is quite a lot of sentences in the French language.Nevertheless enjoyable.

Very good but.

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Felt to me, a very real thing, when distance was perhaps a greater chasm than it is today, is cheerful in almost every way, will go over it again, it has plenty of meat.on iys bones.

how varied, life's variety

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