Candide Paperback – April 14, 2012

The lesson from this story is that; Kings and Queens lose kingdoms and thrones, knights lose honors and reputation, reduced to commoners, Officials lose offices and privileges, the rich squander money on food, pleasures and material artifacts in the hope of buying happiness that is never found. Asking too many questions about why is life the way it is, why are things the way they, why events the way they is another waste of time that reveal none of the answers sought and aspired to or sought. The end result of the rapid events and tragedies in Voltaire`s Candid, Is that the key to enjoy life is to be content with what you have, and content with you have is in the simplest and least desired things in life. A small piece of land with a small country house, will give you more pleasure, serenity, honor and peace of mind, in ploughing the land and eating what simple product it may yield, than all the kingdoms and riches of life!

The timelessness of this piece does not falter. The discourse through various portions of history, religion, philosophy and government lends itself to a multitude of discussions (rants???) and interpretations.

It's a classic.

Great!

Fantastic book, was much larger than I had expected

The book was like new and the story was pretty interesting. It had satirical view of the world of the 1700s that can still be applied to the present world.

Flat out one of the funniest books I've ever read. I thought that Jonathan Swift was satirically vicious in Gulliver's Travels and "A Modest Proposal," but Voltaire makes Dean Swift seem a mere Yahoo. One of the most astonishing features of this short, picaresque novel is the speed of the narrative. Works a few centuries old are usually not notable for being quick reads, but I found myself devouring sentences, paragraphs, and chapters at an alarming rate. Alarming because I'd reached the end with nothing more to read.The tale of Candide, the naive hero, who is separated from his love, the deliciously and vulgarly named Cunegonde, is a vehicle for Voltaire to skewer humanity in every way, shape, and form. No aspect of human endeavor is spared his rapier wit--religion, religious figures, the military, government, rulers, nationalities, philosophers and philosophy, sexuality, class dinstinctions, lawyers, the inhospitable natural world, drunkenness and gluttony, etc., and the humor is produced by the accumulation of detail that is used to describe the misfortunes of the various characters. To compound the irony, the tale begins with the pronouncement of Candide's inept tutor Doctor Pangloss that this is "the best of all possible worlds."In the course of their adventures, the characters are kicked, slapped, raped, disemboweled, hanged, burnt at the stake, drowned, stabbed, bayoneted, impaled, blinded, amputated, and my favorite--eaten. The old lady with one buttock, a companion to Cunegonde, at one point says of herself: "Imagine the situation of a Pope's daughter aged fifteen, who in three months had undergone poverty and slavery, had been raped nearly every day, had seen her mother cut into four pieces, had undergone hunger and war, and now dying of the plague in Algiers."Well, she survived, was bought and sold several times, and wound up with some Janizaries in a fort under siege by the Russians. "The twenty Janizaries had sworn never to surrender us. The extremities of hunger to which they were reduced forced them to eat our two eunuchs for fear of breaking their oath. Some days later they resovled to eat the women." A compassionate Imam intervened, however. "'Cut,' said he, 'only one buttock from each of these ladies and you will still have an excellent meal; if you have to return, there will still be as much left in a few days; Heaven will be pleased at so charitable an action and you will be saved.'"All of this detail takes place in the space of half a page and is typical of the rest of the text--savage meat for the free-thinking mind.

Candide (or optimism) is a novella, and yet in it is packed much of life’s misfortunes and human triumphs. It is claimed to have been written as satire on the all-embracing optimism espoused by some German philosophers of the time.Candide, whose ‘general look was that of utter simplicity’, is the illegitimate nephew of a German baron (the Baron von thunder-ten-Tronckh). At the baron’s castle, he lived in cusp of luxury, under the mentorship of the scholar, Pangloss, who preaches to him that this world is “the best of all possible worlds.”‘It is demonstrable’, Pangloss would say, ‘that thing cannot be other than they are. For, since everything is made for a purpose, everthing must be for the best possible purpose, Noses, you observe, were made so support spectacles: consequently we have spectacles. Legs, it is plain were created to wear breeches, and are supplied with them.Events in the novel are the antithesis of the Pangloss’s tutelage. Open the book at random, you are likely to find yourself in the midst of a misadventure. Almost every human catastrophe that can happen does happen in Candide. From a young age, Candide seems entangled in the webs of sorrow from which he apparently could not escape. When he falls in love with the baron’s young daughter, Cunégonde, the Baron expels him from his home. Soon after, he is conscripted into the army of the Bulgars. He wanders away from camp for a brief walk and is brutally flogged as a deserter.Suffering and peril soon become Candide’s constant companions. As he flees from life’s fiendish malice to destinations across the world, misfortune stalks him like an implacable enemy. Much as Pangloss holds firm to his philosophy, Candide’s simplicity is soon replaced by scepticism as he struggles to find justification for all the human anguish he had witnessedVoltaire also casts a searching light at the hypocrisy and corruption of organized religion through characters who appear in the story. The reader learns about the daughter of a Pope, a vicious Catholic Inquisitor, who has a mistress; and a Franciscan friar who is a thief, despite the vow of poverty he had taken. Voltaire also introduces a Jesuit colonel who is a homosexual.However, Candide, contrary to the meaning of the title is a very complex book. Juxtaposed to calamity is joy, and next to sorrow and death is a celebration of life. At various points, Candide believes that Cunégonde, Pangloss, and the baron are dead, only to discover later that they had survived. Much as these “resurrections” seem out of step with the general tone of the novel-perhaps, because of them, the reader gets to know the real motive of the writer.With his bleak canvass of misery, Voltaire may have been exalting the resilience of the human spirit and its triumph over adversity. Perhaps in depicting man’s vices, he was also admiring humanity’s virtues. Perhaps far from mocking optimism, he renounces nihilism. His novel is an eloquent narrative of the vicissitudes of life, and the rise and fall of man’s fortunes. Thus, in the expansive dialogue between its two main characters we learn that Candide is anything but simple, nor is Pangloss completely an old fool. Battered warriors though they were, they had a reverence and yearning for life despite the mental and physical torture it had inflicted on them.The novel also reveals Voltaire’s romantic side. The love between Candide and Cunegonde, like that between Femina Daza and Florentina Ariza in Marquez’s Love in the time of Cholera, endures, despite the many disappointments and ravages of life. That he continued to love one woman throughout his life despite the rubble in his soul was another sign of his indestructible optimism. Finally, after his life-long travails that at times made him feel like cutting his own throat, Candide finds peace in the simple life of farming. In some way, his final lesson to the reader is that nature, is not a place just to visit, it is our home.Reading Candide’s is an endless pleasure -a rollercoaster ride of both joy and sadness. In it are parts of our lives that we know fully well. The book is a true classic and an amazing celebration of literature.