“Peculiarly fortunate”

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.

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Very good but.

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.

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1 person found this helpful

how varied, life's variety

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.

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