Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Liveright Publishing Corporation (1978), 275 pages
Description
"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in The Enormous Room, a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as Cummings' poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like Catch-22 and MASH, Cummings' novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member John
The story is simple: Cummings and a good friend, Brown, moral objectors to the war, were assigned as ambulance drivers in France during WWI. They are a couple of free spirits, comfortable in French after a month or so lying around Paris and enjoying all that it had to offer, and as such, they run
The book is not so much a classic war memoir, as it is a masterpiece celebrating the power and worth of the individual against the moral blindness and ineptitude of almost any kind of authority, and especially any associated with the government of France. Cummings ranks, in order of obtuseness and stupidity, the gendarmes of France at the bottom, just underneath the plantons, the guards of the prison who are soldiers not on active duty. Cummings misses no opportunity to ridicule the authorities that would "safeguard" the integrity of the country by arresting almost any of the people he meets in the enormous room (small time crooks, pimps, some arrested simply because of their foreign nationalities, some clearly mentally deficient) against those same authorities, or that same system, sending millions to their deaths in a pointless war.
The style of writing is wonderful. Cummings presents everything as a great lark. He is delighted beyond measure with being arrested and taken out of the hated ambulance battalion. He thinks his transit prison cell, with its stinking toilet pail, is wonderful; he savours his freedom of thought and actions within his cell. At no single point does he bemoan his fate (except towards the end with Brown is transferred to another prison, but again that is the loss of his friend), even when describing the indescribably foul food and soup that they daily received in the prison, and when there was no indication of how or when their futures might be decided by the authorities.
The writing style is also a joy. This, apparently, was the first modern novel to include foreign-language phrases, in this case, French. But more intriguing is Cummings's use of language to describe things. The way, for instance, he uses and strings together unexpected similes:
The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute;it was beating, senseless and futile,with small fists upon a thick enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight. The clammy stupid distance uttered dimly an uncanny conflict–the mutterless tumbling of brutish shadows. A crowding ooze battled with my lungs. My nostrils bought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead,I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness–an altar.
[The Commission] told me...that my friend was a criminal...and I told it with a great deal of well-chose politeness that I disagreed. In telling how and why I disagreed I think I managed to shove my shovel-shaped imagination under the refuse of their intellects. At least once or twice.
The punctuation reproduced here is also accurate to the book: Cummings left no space after a comma or semi-colon, thus giving a sense of the words moving more quickly together.
The real joy is the central part of the book in which Cummings describes characters with whom he and Brown shared the enormous room. It is hard to imagine a more disparate group, and he and Brown assigned wonderful names to each and every one of them: The Zulu, The Machine-Fixer, Mexique, The Young Skipper, The Washing Machine Man, Jean Le Negre, Bill the Hollander, The Clever Man, The Schoolmaster, Orange Man, The Silent Man, The Turk, The Young Russian, The Barber, Garibaldi, The Holland Skipper, Judas, The Skipper, Afrique, Young Pole, Emile the Bum, and others. Each is described through an impressive wealth of detail and imagination concerning physical appearance and actions so that each comes very much alive as an individual. And this is Cummings's central theme: the value and the depth that there are within each individual, even those who live on the margins of society and who have no "future" in terms of that society, because it is the individual worth that matters, not the trappings or categories of artificial society and government structures. They are not all nice people, but in each of them, through Cummings's descriptions, you get a glimpse of the complex histories, fears, and hopes that comprise each and every individual person. The following perhaps best summarizes Cummings's feelings:
Despite their natural puzzlement [at Brown and Cummings collecting various coloured objects] everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I,at this moment and in the city of New York,the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider the Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas. But of course The Great American Public has a handicap which my friends at Le Perté did not as rule have–education. Let no one sound his indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that,for an educated gent or lady,to create is first of all to destroy–that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs(whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.
A book that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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right up against their commanding officer who believes that the Americans are there to teach the French how to do everything from winning the war to living their lives. Cummings and Brown find their American colleagues dense and thoroughly unexciting and spend all of their spare time with the French workers in the group. They even apply to join the French airforce, but express a reluctance to kill Germans. Following on this, Brown reports in letters home the defeatist and exhausted attitude of many of the French troops; for this he is arrested by the French authorities, and so is Cummings for no other reason than that he is Brown's best friend, and in this, Cummings sees the hand of their commanding officer. The book describes Cummings's voyage to prison, where he is reunited with Brown, and then details their daily lives (they were held through the fall of 1917), but most especially describes the wealth of interesting characters with whom they live in one enormous room. The third part of the book describes their separation when Brown was transferred to another prison for the duration of the war, and Cummings was set free to return to the USA.The book is not so much a classic war memoir, as it is a masterpiece celebrating the power and worth of the individual against the moral blindness and ineptitude of almost any kind of authority, and especially any associated with the government of France. Cummings ranks, in order of obtuseness and stupidity, the gendarmes of France at the bottom, just underneath the plantons, the guards of the prison who are soldiers not on active duty. Cummings misses no opportunity to ridicule the authorities that would "safeguard" the integrity of the country by arresting almost any of the people he meets in the enormous room (small time crooks, pimps, some arrested simply because of their foreign nationalities, some clearly mentally deficient) against those same authorities, or that same system, sending millions to their deaths in a pointless war.
The style of writing is wonderful. Cummings presents everything as a great lark. He is delighted beyond measure with being arrested and taken out of the hated ambulance battalion. He thinks his transit prison cell, with its stinking toilet pail, is wonderful; he savours his freedom of thought and actions within his cell. At no single point does he bemoan his fate (except towards the end with Brown is transferred to another prison, but again that is the loss of his friend), even when describing the indescribably foul food and soup that they daily received in the prison, and when there was no indication of how or when their futures might be decided by the authorities.
The writing style is also a joy. This, apparently, was the first modern novel to include foreign-language phrases, in this case, French. But more intriguing is Cummings's use of language to describe things. The way, for instance, he uses and strings together unexpected similes:
The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute;it was beating, senseless and futile,with small fists upon a thick enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight. The clammy stupid distance uttered dimly an uncanny conflict–the mutterless tumbling of brutish shadows. A crowding ooze battled with my lungs. My nostrils bought against the monstrous atmospheric slime which hugged a sweet unpleasant odour. Staring ahead,I gradually disinterred the pale carrion of the darkness–an altar.
[The Commission] told me...that my friend was a criminal...and I told it with a great deal of well-chose politeness that I disagreed. In telling how and why I disagreed I think I managed to shove my shovel-shaped imagination under the refuse of their intellects. At least once or twice.
The punctuation reproduced here is also accurate to the book: Cummings left no space after a comma or semi-colon, thus giving a sense of the words moving more quickly together.
The real joy is the central part of the book in which Cummings describes characters with whom he and Brown shared the enormous room. It is hard to imagine a more disparate group, and he and Brown assigned wonderful names to each and every one of them: The Zulu, The Machine-Fixer, Mexique, The Young Skipper, The Washing Machine Man, Jean Le Negre, Bill the Hollander, The Clever Man, The Schoolmaster, Orange Man, The Silent Man, The Turk, The Young Russian, The Barber, Garibaldi, The Holland Skipper, Judas, The Skipper, Afrique, Young Pole, Emile the Bum, and others. Each is described through an impressive wealth of detail and imagination concerning physical appearance and actions so that each comes very much alive as an individual. And this is Cummings's central theme: the value and the depth that there are within each individual, even those who live on the margins of society and who have no "future" in terms of that society, because it is the individual worth that matters, not the trappings or categories of artificial society and government structures. They are not all nice people, but in each of them, through Cummings's descriptions, you get a glimpse of the complex histories, fears, and hopes that comprise each and every individual person. The following perhaps best summarizes Cummings's feelings:
Despite their natural puzzlement [at Brown and Cummings collecting various coloured objects] everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I,at this moment and in the city of New York,the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider the Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas. But of course The Great American Public has a handicap which my friends at Le Perté did not as rule have–education. Let no one sound his indignant yawp at this. I refer to the fact that,for an educated gent or lady,to create is first of all to destroy–that there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs(whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and thoroughly and perfectly annihilated by that vast and painful process of Unthinking which may result in a minute bit of purely personal Feeling. Which minute bit is Art.
A book that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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LibraryThing member ErnestHemingway
"E.E. Cummings' Enormous Room was the best book published last year that I read."
Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1923
Selected Letters, pg. 105
Letter to Edmund Wilson, 1923
Selected Letters, pg. 105
LibraryThing member M.Campanella
Reading this book, I am reminded of a review I read somewhere (Amazon, likely) calling Samuel Delany's style 'prosetry'. At the time, I was not even sure what the devil the person was referring to (I recall looking the word up), but gathering that the person who used it meant it as a bad thing.
cummings, on the other hand, seems to do exactly that. He seems to have a disregard for the journalistic writing conventions that form what prose novels should look like. You can almost see cummings own poetry style peering from under the cloth of this prose work, ready to transmute the whole thing into poetry. Consider:
"
The straw will do. Ouch, but it's Dirty.-Several hours elapse...
Stepsandfumble. Klang. Repetition of promise to Monsieur Savy, etc.
Turnkeyish and turnkeyish. Identical expression. One body collapses sufficiently to deposit a hunk of bread and a piece of water.
Give your bowl.
I gave it, smiled and said : "Well, how about that pencil?"
"Pencil?" T-C looked at t-c.
They recited then the following word : "Tomorrow." Klangandfootsteps.
"
It's not bad, but I wonder if it works in a novel. If this was written in verse, I would not have a problem with it. But it isn't, it's written in prose.
This is not to say you can't be poetic in prose, just that you can do so while still respecting the confines of prose.
There is something much worse n the book. Namely, a constant switching from English to French. Language switching can at time be done well, as I feel Cormac McCarthy does. The problem, I think, may best be summed up with an Orwell quote, which I will paraphrase as "don't use a foreign word when a perfectly good English word exists." This should be extended to phrases as well. Consider: "Except for the position - well, c'est la guerre." Now, I can understand that line, but I can't understand why the hell it couldn't have simply been said in English. As far as I can discern, all this does is add a layer the kind of faux-intellectualism some attribute to the use of a foreign language. It doesn't make you smarter, and it doesn't make you sound smarter. McCarthy does it well in his books because he uses it to place his story; when you are dealing with stories set on the border it does much to reveal setting and characters. Here, that is not the case. Again in the sentence "Madame la vendeuse de cafe, I shall remember you for more than a little while." there is nothing than a similar sentence translated to English.
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Delany is certainly poetic with his prose, and that is what I have come to enjoy the most about his books, but it seems to me as a far cry from a blending of poetry and prose.cummings, on the other hand, seems to do exactly that. He seems to have a disregard for the journalistic writing conventions that form what prose novels should look like. You can almost see cummings own poetry style peering from under the cloth of this prose work, ready to transmute the whole thing into poetry. Consider:
"
The straw will do. Ouch, but it's Dirty.-Several hours elapse...
Stepsandfumble. Klang. Repetition of promise to Monsieur Savy, etc.
Turnkeyish and turnkeyish. Identical expression. One body collapses sufficiently to deposit a hunk of bread and a piece of water.
Give your bowl.
I gave it, smiled and said : "Well, how about that pencil?"
"Pencil?" T-C looked at t-c.
They recited then the following word : "Tomorrow." Klangandfootsteps.
"
It's not bad, but I wonder if it works in a novel. If this was written in verse, I would not have a problem with it. But it isn't, it's written in prose.
This is not to say you can't be poetic in prose, just that you can do so while still respecting the confines of prose.
There is something much worse n the book. Namely, a constant switching from English to French. Language switching can at time be done well, as I feel Cormac McCarthy does. The problem, I think, may best be summed up with an Orwell quote, which I will paraphrase as "don't use a foreign word when a perfectly good English word exists." This should be extended to phrases as well. Consider: "Except for the position - well, c'est la guerre." Now, I can understand that line, but I can't understand why the hell it couldn't have simply been said in English. As far as I can discern, all this does is add a layer the kind of faux-intellectualism some attribute to the use of a foreign language. It doesn't make you smarter, and it doesn't make you sound smarter. McCarthy does it well in his books because he uses it to place his story; when you are dealing with stories set on the border it does much to reveal setting and characters. Here, that is not the case. Again in the sentence "Madame la vendeuse de cafe, I shall remember you for more than a little while." there is nothing than a similar sentence translated to English.
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LibraryThing member datrappert
Though sometimes called an autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room tells the basically true tale of how Cummings and a friend, serving as ambulance drivers during the First World War, were detained in prison for several months by the French Government as a result of their antiwar views and, in
The Enormous Room refers to the common room where the sixty or so prisoners (at any time) had their bedding, their bathroom, their card table, and the possessions they were allowed to keep. The smell was awful--but, in large part, the company was excellent. Cummings spends most of the book drawing deft character sketches of his fellow detainees, some on their way to detention for the remainder of the War, and a few, like himself, who would be released after a few months. The depiction of the friendships that form and the small kindnesses that pass between the men are very moving. Indeed, Cummings initially found it much better than working for his boss at the ambulance service. In time, however, the absurdity of why some of the men are being detained and the small cruelties inflicted on the prisoners by the staff and a small handful of their fellow prisoners begin to add up and the book acquires a more melancholy tone.
One caution to any potential reader: Cummings repeats much of the dialog in French. Perhaps you have a footnoted edition with translations; I didn't. However, the translation feature on my Kindle, along with my small knowledge of French, worked well enough for me to understand pretty much everything. Another reason to favor e-books.
For the most part, Cummings writes in a clear, direct manner. Only occasionally does he slip into a kind of prose poetry that vaguely reflects the poems he is best known for. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore how human beings can cope with and overcome hardship, as well as anyone wanting to study a bureaucracy gone amok.
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particular, the contents of a few letters Cummings' friend had written.The Enormous Room refers to the common room where the sixty or so prisoners (at any time) had their bedding, their bathroom, their card table, and the possessions they were allowed to keep. The smell was awful--but, in large part, the company was excellent. Cummings spends most of the book drawing deft character sketches of his fellow detainees, some on their way to detention for the remainder of the War, and a few, like himself, who would be released after a few months. The depiction of the friendships that form and the small kindnesses that pass between the men are very moving. Indeed, Cummings initially found it much better than working for his boss at the ambulance service. In time, however, the absurdity of why some of the men are being detained and the small cruelties inflicted on the prisoners by the staff and a small handful of their fellow prisoners begin to add up and the book acquires a more melancholy tone.
One caution to any potential reader: Cummings repeats much of the dialog in French. Perhaps you have a footnoted edition with translations; I didn't. However, the translation feature on my Kindle, along with my small knowledge of French, worked well enough for me to understand pretty much everything. Another reason to favor e-books.
For the most part, Cummings writes in a clear, direct manner. Only occasionally does he slip into a kind of prose poetry that vaguely reflects the poems he is best known for. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore how human beings can cope with and overcome hardship, as well as anyone wanting to study a bureaucracy gone amok.
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LibraryThing member amerynth
I found e.e. cumming's novel "The Enormous Room" to be a challenging and dull read.
It's an autobiographical story about the time he was imprisoned in France following his service as an ambulance driver during World War I for (erroneous) suspicions of treason.
He is transported to a series of
I was just bored by this book -- which has dense prose and plenty of French sprinkled through it -- my mind kept wandering and I frequently was wondering if I missed something that makes this tale interesting. I'm glad cummings mostly stuck to poetry.
It's an autobiographical story about the time he was imprisoned in France following his service as an ambulance driver during World War I for (erroneous) suspicions of treason.
He is transported to a series of
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prisons where he meets a variety of people, which he describes in great detail, before his eventual release four months later.I was just bored by this book -- which has dense prose and plenty of French sprinkled through it -- my mind kept wandering and I frequently was wondering if I missed something that makes this tale interesting. I'm glad cummings mostly stuck to poetry.
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LibraryThing member abirdman
Cummings' only novel, an autobiographical work about being imprisoned in France during WWI.
LibraryThing member rreis
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
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Cummings writing for what he writes and the way he does it. Show Less
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
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.
LibraryThing member ursula
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
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."
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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."
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LibraryThing member thomnottom
Challenging read due to Cummings' poetic prose and his interspersing of French dialogue. It is also not a very straightforward read, as he jumps from story to story and introduces characters in whatever order seemed to appeal to him. In the end, I did find it rather rewarding - both for the style
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and semi-fictional account of the time period. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kristelh
I completed this work by the young e.e.cummings written at 18 about his time as a prisoner or detainee of the French Government for suspicion during WWI. The author my be better known for his poetry but this is a work of nonfiction/memoir and the prose is delightful. He paints a picture with his
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words. I read this as an audio and am now going through it to study it a bit. Not sure yet how I would rate it. But it is probably a great piece of literature. Show Less
LibraryThing member brakketh
Amazing and enjoyable glimpse into the rich internal world of e.e. cummings.
LibraryThing member markm2315
The author, well known to me as a poet, was a volunteer ambulance driver in France during the First World War. He was imprisoned for suspected anti-war sentiment, but eventually released and returned to the US. This is his account of his imprisonment. I’d never heard of either his imprisonment or
Anyway, Cummings' account held my interest, but I had some problems with it. I know Cummings was a young man, but his account has a definite adolescent quality replete with various highly offensive slang terms for his fellow inmates. The book is peppered with French; single words, phrases, and longer amounts. I suppose this is to give the flavor of the situation. I know a few words of French, but I was constantly using the Kindle to translate. Some of the words may be the slang of the times since I could not translate them. It didn’t seem to me that the book would have lost anything by being written all in one language or the other. Lastly, the book is described as sort of an ur-Catch 22. But it is hardly that. Furthermore, I'm familiar with several other anti-war writings of the time that are superior. I think this book’s obscurity is understandable.
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this work, but it was apparently quite controversial when published in the early 1920s. Several critics bombed it, essentially for being politically radical. Some critics praised it but said that it was a work of fiction and some compared it to The Pilgrim's Progress (The author has a characteristic descriptive style, which I found irritating, but he specifically denies that the book is fiction [but, what does that mean?]).Anyway, Cummings' account held my interest, but I had some problems with it. I know Cummings was a young man, but his account has a definite adolescent quality replete with various highly offensive slang terms for his fellow inmates. The book is peppered with French; single words, phrases, and longer amounts. I suppose this is to give the flavor of the situation. I know a few words of French, but I was constantly using the Kindle to translate. Some of the words may be the slang of the times since I could not translate them. It didn’t seem to me that the book would have lost anything by being written all in one language or the other. Lastly, the book is described as sort of an ur-Catch 22. But it is hardly that. Furthermore, I'm familiar with several other anti-war writings of the time that are superior. I think this book’s obscurity is understandable.
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Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1922
ISBN
0871401193 / 9780871401199