The Enormous Room: (Starbooks Classics Editions)

Linguistic mastery and dry humour at its best - both making the message of the novel all the more chilling. For its urgent appeal to humanity, this is a classic alongside E.M.Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander Solzhenytsyn, Primo Levi or Simon Wiesenthal. It is probably the most easily accessible of Cummings's work and I would recommend it to anyone who is being introduced to Cummings' writing and may feel put off by the complexity of his poetry.This is one of the books one keeps reading over and over and never ceases to enjoy.

Grerat book on a reallly great subject well worth a read, a great gift for someone. well worth the money.

This edition is awful, as it it full of printing errors. I advise other reader to buy different editions. My evaluation of the book is based solely on this specific edition, as the printing mistakes take the pleasure of reading this book away

Skip this.

Perhaps the fact that, as I view this item, there is only one copy left in stock speaks volumes about the story itself. In continuous print since its original publication in 1921 (or 1922, I can never remember precisely), The Enormous Room is Cummings' tale of his ordeal as a prisoner of the French government during WWI. Cummings & his friend, William Slater Brown, being pacifists volunteered to drive ambulances for a French company. However, when they found that the paranoid French were heavily censoring their letters home & were spying on the foreign nationals that worked for them, Brown in particular began to include many salacious bits in his letters in order that he might really raise the ire of the censors, never thinking that he & his friend could be arrested for sedition or whatever it was that they were charged with. For four months, Cummings spent time in the grueling hell of La Ferte Mace, suffering greatly at the hands of the French who were supposed to be our allies.Still, rather than see this as a moment to whine about his predicament, Cummings instead employed his usual individualist outlook onto the situation. As only Cummings can, he brings to life his experience through his use of language--his characteristically lyrical English with liberal doses of his aurally received French sprinkled throughout. This edition has a handy glossary at the back to help with the translation of the massive amount of French in the book, & it also contains the original illustrations, restored to the text as Cummings himself had wanted. The use of French is interesting in itself because of how Cummings & Brown would learn the language. At the outset, their adventure begins in chaos as they are lost in Paris with no way to find their ambulance company headquarters (not that they had the desire to find their post, either). During this time, they learned French while spending time with "ladies of the evening" in the Parisian pubs of the day. This colloquial French is what finds its way into the book, with many intentional misspellings that represent to the reader the experience Cummings & Brown would have had as Americans galavanting about Paris with absolutely no knowledge of the language or the customs of the locals. It is this almost childlike approach to experience that Cummings brings to the horror of his French prison ordeal, allowing him to elevate the human spirit, through comedy & through his unique outlook on life, in a way that can only be said of E.E. Cummings.There are many direct allusions to "A Pilgrim's Progress," an old, English morality play (by Bunyan, I believe), as Cummings sees his imprisonment as his own odyssey of a sort. Of course, as is often the way with Cummings, there is also a healthy dose of his philosophy of the individual, of the indomitability of the human spirit, & of his sense of wonder at everything around him. He conveys things through language in a manner that is specific to the poet yet is undoubtedly the hand of a gifted novelist & storyteller. In so many ways, Cummings allows you to feel every second of his experience, at once awe-ful & awesome, a true journey to the depths of hell & back out through his own purgatory to a final salvation as he realizes that even at his lowest, he was always the free-minded individual who refused to be conquered by circumstance. This book stands alone among the many WWI novels. This is a story that is distinctly E.E. Cummings, distinctly the concision of a poet, yet beautifully crafted narrative that allows us to enter into his experience as he brings it to life on the page.I highly recommend "The Cummings Typescript Editions" printing of this book, with forward by George J. Firmage. This edition, of all the editions I have found, is the most true to the author's original intent & contains the manuscript as he himself envisioned it (he actually oversaw a reprinting of the book, I believe in 1935 though it might have been 1928, in which he restored all of the language as he intended it, but I do not believe this version had any of the drawings he had made for the book). The flow of the text, the very helpful glossary of French idioms, & the emotive pencil drawings that illustrate the text make this a truly unique printing of this story. It is certainly worth owning, especially if you're a fan of Cummings already. If you have never read Cummings, this is certainly a good place to start because this was his very first book, a novel, published well before he ever put out a book of poems, though as I've said the poet is certainly present in the way he crafts the narrative to bring to life the imagery that makes up any good story. Of course, given the level & copious amount of French in the book, once you've gone through it using the glossary to understand everything, you really should go back through it at least one additional time just to experience the story all the way through as a continuous work, without stopping to look up the meanings you hopefully have retained from your first read through. This book is well worth the time & effort that several readings require, but I'm not really sure it's fair to call such pleasured reading "effort."