Candide

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Candide, but something about the way Maggie Nelson dropped Voltaire's famous quote about killing an admiral to encourage the others into Bluets made me feel like I was missing out having not read something of his.

Candide comprises a series of unfortunate events constructed to test (or ridicule) the philosophical premise that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” If Voltaire had called the novel Fuck You, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—Philosophical Optimism is Trash and So Are You I would have been better prepared.

It was at its best for me when contemplating happiness (and, briefly, suicide). I imagine the maxim ‘money can't buy happiness' may already have been tired in the 17th century, but either way it's well-expressed here.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley—in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered—or simply to sit here and do nothing?

9/10
To give a brief introduction, Leibniz was an Enlightenment-era philosopher whose mantra could be simplified to ‘This is the best of all possible worlds.' Now, anyone who has stepped outside the bounds of their homes knows that this is not the case. Another philosopher of the same era, Voltaire, seemed to be infuriated with it – Candide was written to attack Leibnizian optimism and ridiculed government, military, religion, money, and the concept of honour itself.
When things seem to be getting better, Candide jumps to an entirely new plotline which makes you lose hope. That, to me, is Voltaire's genius. He leaves no holds barred in his unrelenting attack on optimism, so much so that each person takes for granted the horrors of our existence, even when confronted with it first-hand. Cunégonde's caretaker narrates the act of her buttocks being eaten by slavers for survival with an astounding lack of interest in the matter. Candide, the eponymous character, undergoes almost every calamity possible – ranging from being thrown out from his residence to nearly being hanged and even narrowly escaping from cannibals. There are dozens of such tales scattered across the text, and at some point, I just started laughing at Voltaire's ‘show, don't tell' philosophy – this novella might be the best example of the phrase I've ever seen.
Although abrupt, the ending felt perfect – primarily because of what it took for Candide to realise that we cannot always view the world through rose-tinted glasses – it helps to have a sense of realism, however tiny. Philosophy apart, Candide is a beautiful read, and it deserves its place in the Western canon.

I suspect there's something to be said about a book that hasn't lost any of its relevance for over 250 years. It's been probably 15-ish years since I first read Candide, and it's been my yardstick for every satirical novel I've read since. It has a time and a place, but it transcends both somehow, and you don't need to know the history around it to know the ideas it viciously assaults–though knowing the history makes it that much more fun.

I love a bit of satire. Many parts of this book felt like a Monty Python skit or a Mel Brooks film. I’ve never been able to get behind the whole “everything is as it should be” way of thinking, and Voltaire does a really great job of skewering that philosophy in this very short read. The “tend your own garden” line at the end really stuck with me. I think it’s very important advice, especially in this time of social media oversaturation.

Candide is a brilliant masterpiece, a scathingly brutal satire of overly optimistic philosophies of life.

Candide lives a secluded life with a wealthy family in a castle, and his life is so affluent that Candide has his own philosophy teacher, Pangloss.

All is well, and Pangloss' philosophies remain intact until Candide falls in love with the family's daughter and he is expelled into real life.

Real life brings an endless series of horrible events for Candide and all the people he meets, horrible events that are so inexplicably horrible that they make the life of Job appear to be quite Edenic.

Candide at last makes his way back to his homeland and, after all the horrible experiences, he is able to revise his philosophy of life to the practical: Cultivate your garden, he extols, cautiously.

Brilliant. Masterpiece. A must read.