Candide: Or Optimism (Penguin Classics) Candide or Optimism is Voltaire’s sceptically acerbic look at a world of woes and travails – C. M Mills – Knoxville Tennessee
Candide is one of the world’s greatest philosophical novels. Its author is Voltaire (1694-1178) whose pen was warmed up in hell with sceptical inquiry into the vagaries of human existence. In this brief book of 100 pages he assails the theory of philsopher Baron von Leibnitz that this planet is “the best of all possible worlds.”
Voltaire chooses as his lead character the fatuous Candide a young Westphalian who is naive of the ways of the wicked world. The callow and love sick swain is booted out of the Castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh for his amorous infatuation with the fetching Cunegonde. This young lady is the daughter of the baron. No matter what terrible things occur in Candide’s life he remains a cock-eyed optimist!
One adventures follows another. We see Candide serving in the the Bulgarian army where he is almost beaten to death. His friend Dr Pangloss is supposedly hanged in an auto de fa though we later learn he is alive. Cunegonde is fetched away by pirates. Candide and Dr. Pangloss suffer through the famous Lisbon Earthquake which killed thousands in 1755.
Candide kills a Jew and an agent of the Spanish inquisition fleeing to Spain and safety with the Jesuits. This order involves our hero in a bitter war between Spain and Portugal. Candide supposedlykills the general of the Jesuits learning that this was a brother of Cunegonde. Candide then escapes to the fabulously wealthy land of Eldorado. He is bilked of his fortune as he travels to England, France, Venice and Turkey on a series of improbable stops on his unrealistic odyssey through life.
Candide is reunited with Dr Pangloss and his faithful servant Cacambo in Constantinople, He also learns that his love’s brother is yet alive. The whole group decide to retire to a small farm and cultivate their garden. This means that work is a powerful deterrent against ennui and despair at the condition of a cruel world of wars, poverty, natural disasters, disease and death. Candide has learned and matured during the course of his many adventures. He and his wife are as happy as it is possible to be.
Voltaire was a brilliant wit and keen witness to man’s inhumanity to man. While he did not live to see the terrors of the French Revolution and the horrors of our own century his perceptive little novel is a gem of understanding of the human condition. An essential book in Western Civilization.
: One of Penguin Classics’s most popular translations- now also in our elegant black spine dress
Candide: Or Optimism (Penguin Classics)
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Candide, and Related Writings : David Wootton’s scalpel-sharp translation of Candide features a brilliant Introduction, a map of Candide’s travels, and a selection of those writings of Voltaire, Leibniz, Pope and Rousseau crucial for fully appreciating this eighteenth-century satiric masterpiece that even today retains its celebrated bite.
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