Candide
1746
- conduct of life
- readers
- literatura francesa
- satire
- fiction
- civilization
- moral conditions
- enlightenment
- politics and government
- life
The story
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism.
What it’s like
Brisk, brittle, and deliberately bright on the surface: a wry eighteenth-century voice that moves at the pace of a fable, all crisp epigram and sudden reversal, with sentences that snap shut like a joke's punchline. The sensory world is sketched in quick strokes, a gilded baron's castle, a rocking Lisbon, a gold-hungry Eldorado, a dusty Dutch farm, each rendered with a few vivid objects and then left behind. The mood is mock-serious and sly, bright with absurdity but with an undertow of sour resignation, the feeling of laughing at a catastrophe that keeps happening. It suits a rainy afternoon with a cup of something hot, a long bus ride, or a clear-headed reread when you want to be amused by human folly without much emotional weight. Violence and cruelty are frequent and matter-of-fact: earthquakes, shipwreck, executions, whippings, and a sustained, unsentimental treatment of disease and war, all played for irony rather than horror, with no graphic lingering. Sexual content is bawdy and brief. It is for readers who enjoy philosophical satire, sharp social observation, and dry comedy that turns cruelty into an argument.
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