The Enormous Room cover art

The Enormous Room

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Thousands of incredible audiobooks and podcasts to take wherever you go.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling with the Plus Catalogue - unlimited listening to thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Enormous Room

By: E. E. Cummings
Narrated by: Ken Kliban
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

The Enormous Room is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I.

Drawing on his experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance-driver, Cummings recounts the series of mistakes that led to his arrest and imprisonment for treason. This edition restores much of the original manuscript.

Public Domain (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Classics France
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Captain's Table cover art
The Queen’s Necklace cover art
The Magic Mountain cover art
It Happened in Boston? cover art
Under the Jolly Roger cover art
The Black Obelisk cover art
The Frontier Garrison cover art
Carmen and Other Stories cover art
The Man in Lower Ten cover art
The Bastard cover art
Resurrection cover art
Three Comrades cover art
Craven House cover art
Despair cover art
Crocodile on the Sandbank cover art
Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman cover art

Editor reviews

Narrator Ken Kliban gives a definitive performance of e. e. Cummings' autobiographical novel about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I for supporting his friend's anti-war statements. Kliban perfectly captures Cummings' mixture of intellectualism and wit as he describes the people he meets and the absurd situations he finds himself in during his four-month incarceration. The other characters are also vividly embellished with accents and mannerisms that make them stand out, and listeners will feel as though they know these people from real life.

What listeners say about The Enormous Room

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 1.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 1 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Audio of the 1922 version not approved by author

This audio is quite well performed and gets the ironic tone of Cummings's WW1 imprisonment told as a bit of a lark very well. Purchasers should be aware that this appears to be the text of the 1922 edition, which omitted some quite long passages from the 'fair copy' text of the manuscript and translates many of the French passages into English. The author called these 'stupidities' in a letter to his father, but I suspect most listeners will not mind them and may even prefer this version as more comprehensible.

As usual, I like to separate comment on the quality of the work from my rating of the quality of the recording, which is a 4-star performance. The work itself is interesting insofar as telling of a strange (and outrageous) miscarriage of justice, but becomes quickly repetitive and is rather long for what it achieves. One might say that the boredom replicates that of being imprisoned for an unclear offence and an indeterminate length of time and thus is a modernist replication of medium as message, but that might not be enough interest to hold many listeners.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!