The Enormous Room
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Narrated by:
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Ken Kliban
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By:
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E. E. Cummings
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.
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- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Abridged
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The Master and Margarita is one of the most famous and best-selling Russian novels of the 20th century, despite its surreal environment of talking cats, Satan and mysterious happenings. Naxos AudioBooks presents this careful abridgement of a new translation in an imaginative reading by the charismatic Julian Rhind-Tutt. With War and Peace and Crime and Punishment among the Naxos AudioBooks best-sellers, this too promises to be a front title.
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Very vivid and amazing writing style
- By Sina Beni on 05-04-22
By: Mikhail Bulgakov
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Amerika
- The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.
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ha ha ha this is terrific
- By tom on 01-29-14
By: Franz Kafka
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Resurrection
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 20 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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When Prince Dmitri Nekhludov is called for jury duty on a murder case, he little knows how the experience will change his life. Faced with the accused, a prostitute, he recognizes Katusha, the young girl he seduced and abandoned many years before, and realizes his responsibility for the life of degradation she has been forced to lead. His determination to make amends leads him into the darkest reaches of the Tsarist prison system, and to the beginning of his spiritual regeneration.
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Same Mood, The Same Power, Resurrected
- By Darwin8u on 11-01-15
By: Leo Tolstoy
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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Except the Dying
- A Murdoch Mystery, Book 1
- By: Maureen Jennings
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In the cold Toronto winter of 1895, the naked body of a servant girl is found frozen in a deserted laneway. The young victim was pregnant when she died. Detective William Murdoch soon discovers that many of those connected with the girl's life have secrets to hide. Was her death on attempt to cover up a scandal in one of the city's influential families?
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If you like the show - don't buy
- By Sarah on 06-09-16
By: Maureen Jennings
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Watt
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Dermot Crowley
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor.
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Great performance!
- By Russell Atwood on 02-18-24
By: Samuel Beckett
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Three Comrades
- By: Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Wesley Wheen - translator
- Narrated by: Michael Braun
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.
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Love and friendship in a dying world.
- By Tarquin on 03-18-19
By: Erich Maria Remarque, and others
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Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance
- By: Gyles Brandreth
- Narrated by: Bill Wallis
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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London, 1889. Oscar Wilde, celebrated poet, wit, playwright, and raconteur is the literary sensation of his age. All Europe lies at his feet. Yet when he chances across the naked corpse of sixteen-year-old Billy Wood, posed by candlelight in a dark stifling attic room, he cannot ignore the brutal murder. With the help of fellow author Arthur Conan Doyle he sets out to solve the crime - but it is Wilde's unparalleled access to all degrees of late Victorian life, from society drawing rooms to the underclass, that will prove the decisive factor in their investigation....
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needs glue
- By connie on 11-13-11
By: Gyles Brandreth
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Les Misérables
- Penguin Classics
- By: Christine Donougher, Victor Hugo, Robert Tombs
- Narrated by: Adeel Akhtar, Natalie Simpson, Adrian Scarborough, and others
- Length: 65 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Policeman, Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
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Great Book, Great Translation, 5 Great Narrators
- By Rain Wiegartner on 06-07-20
By: Christine Donougher, and others
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Hunger
- A Novel
- By: Knut Hamsun
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Knut Hamsun's Hunger, first published in 1890 and hailed as the literary beginning of the 20th century, is a masterpiece of psychologically driven fiction. The story of a struggling artist living on the edge of starvation, the novel portrays the unnamed first-person narrator's descent into paranoia, despair, and madness as hunger overtakes him. As the protagonist loses his grip on reality, Hamsun brilliantly portrays the disturbing and irrational recesses of the human mind through increasingly disjointed and urgent prose.
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Book quite good; wrong narrator
- By Erez on 05-05-11
By: Knut Hamsun
What listeners say about The Enormous Room
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- PalladinRN
- 08-23-22
Interesting Story But...
Since I do not speak French, I had a very hard time following the storyline.
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- MrsOLena
- 04-07-23
Interesting but need a translator
An interesting story, but as others have mentioned, the copious amounts of French can be annoying if you have no background in that language. Most I could glean via context and weak recollections of HS French. I don't blame the narrator for this.
Do be prepared for a lot of non-PC language as this was written just over 100 years ago and uses vernacular of the time and situation.
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- NomDeGuerre
- 11-09-21
Good story. Terrible narration
Never mind the story. Ken Kilban’s voice stabbed my ears for the entire 2520 hours I was listening.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jean
- 06-20-13
e.e.cummings life in WWI prison camp
I chose this book to read as part of my reading about world war one. Edward Estlin Cummings is a well known poet and artist of the 20th Century. This book "The Enormous Room" was published in 1922. Cummings enlisted in 1917 to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corp along with some of his friends. The book tells about his and William Slater Brown's arrest by the French Military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. The charges came about from a letter Brown wrote home. Apparently there was a problem with an over zealous censor translating from English to French. They were held in several jails then held 31/2 months in a concentration camp at Depot de Triage in La Ferte-Mace Orne, Normandy. They were never charged, or had a trial, just put into prison. I found it interesting that Cummings did not get angry or upset. He looked on the episode as an adventure and was fascinated to meet so many different types of people from so many countries. He tried to learn different languages and as much about the people as possible. They were all confined it a giant room most were like him held without trial or charges. He said some were guilty most were not. He finally was released when his father went to President Wilson to seek his help. After he was released and returned to the U.S. in January 1918 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the 12th Division. After the war he lived in France for a few years and fell in love with Paris, he never let the experience make him bitter about France or it's people. The book is up beat and Cummings since of humor comes through with his description and names he gives various people. I shall have to read some of his poetry, I only have vague memories of them from school. If you are interested in history this book would interest you. Ken Kliban did a great job narrating the book with all the French words.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 11-19-16
The Prose of Panopticons
It struck me at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or more miserable than himself."
― E.E. Cummings, The Enormous Room
Prison Literature as a genre is fascinating. Like war literature, there is this gap between those who have actually lived in prison and their experiences and those who imagine. Certainly the job of the fiction writer is to explore spaces unknown to most, and perhaps unknown even to the author. Science Fiction is filled with writing that follows that pattern. However, from the several novels I've read by authors who have actually been in prison (like books written by those who have actually fought in war), the experience seems to create an almost surreal or absurd view of things. E.E. Cummings who was incarcerated by the French during WWI because of letters written by his friend, portrays this absurdity of confinement in this novel, and just as Dostoevsky does in Notes from a Dead House or Solzhenitsyn does in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I could continue the list with works by Paul Bunyan, Cervantes, Marque de Sade, Chester Himes, O. Henry, Jack London, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, etc. I could also include the political writing and books by Napoleon, Hitler, Malcom X, Mussolini, etc.
Obviously, the political tracts written in prison (or even the religious tracts too) deserve a lot of attention, but 'The Enormous Room' has more in common with Kafka and the modernists than it does with any protest writing. It is the attempt by the trapped artist to create something from an experience. It is a scratch to explain, a scribble to remember, a set of words meant to make sense of the absurdity of the cell. This isn't a perfect book and I will be the first to admit I prefer E.E. Cummings poetry to his prose. But it is also an important marker. It is a novel that shows just how warped even good systems can get during war, and just how pleasant some captives really are. In many ways Cummings wasn't writing to right some wrong, or to expose some evil. He seemed to treat his experience in France as almost an illness, a temporary convalescence that served as a puparium. It wasn't an obvious transformation. He didn't walk in an innocent and exit an artist, but it seemed to be a vector of growth, an accelerant toward the artist.
As I write this I also think there is a natural pull of artist and prison. Does that seem harsh? Prisons represent the ultimate impulse to control for conformity. It is natural that this impulse seeks out and grabs the artist; the ultimate non-conformist. Society is always trying to keep the artist in check, and when the odd, the aberrant, the avante-garde appears too far ahead, too dangerous for the masses, it is often easier for society to just lock the odd up. I don't think this is likely to ever change. There will always be conflict between Pan and Panopticon.
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20 people found this helpful
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- Tony Filanowski
- 09-18-22
Beware if you don’t speak French
I don’t speak French so the many French words and phrases that are used and untranslated left me perplexed and frustrated. The assumption that listeners understand the French language ought to be given as a warning.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Neo
- 03-25-15
Save your money. Pass on this story.
Would you try another book from E. E. Cummings and/or Ken Kliban?
Yes.
What could E. E. Cummings have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
This story lacked any drama. Like watching paint dry.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Ken Kliban?
Narrator did an OK job. He didn't have much to work.
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3 people found this helpful