Enter now the Norton Critical Edition of Candide. This book presents the 75 page story along with 130 additional pages of various articles and essays on the times in which it was written; commentary by Voltaire and by his contemporaries; and critiques of the story by modern writers. Sure there are always a few dull, academic essays making their mandatory appearance in a book like this, but my suggestion is just to skip them. After all there are a lot of them to choose from.

Learn the story behind the story so to speak. After all it is the background of Candide that makes Candide the forceful satire that it is.


VOLTAIRE THE RETROSPECTIVE   November 29, 2002
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

The French writer Voltaire's (1694-1778) novel 'Candide' is a biting, satirical, cynical, and inimical story of an inexperienced and innocent young man who is much misled early in life by Pangloss, his philosophy teacher. Tragi-comical in style, the whole work is certainly the spiritual forefather of 'Waiting for Godot', but it is vastly inventive, the satire is funny, and the action rollicks around the world in a rapid succession of colorful and exciting places. Candide alternately fights for his life, flees for his life, ponders the meaning of life, makes his fortune, or simply travels to stave off boredom. If this were a Mel Brooks film it would be a cross between 'Blazing Saddles', 'Men In Tights', and 'Life Stinks'. There is a grisly and surreal cartoon element to the proceedings with characters constantly being killed by sword, fire, hanging, earthquake, drowning, and whatever, who then come back to life when you least expect it, looking much the worse for wear.

Candide may be on a journey of discovery, but he is just not able to understand anything he discovers. In the school of life he is certainly bottom of the class, and seemingly aspires to stay there. Pangloss has taught him that however things appear, life is arranged so that, 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' - which sounds to me like a parody of a famous scripture from the New Testament letter to the Romans. This absurdist Positive Mental Attitude is then slowly and relentlessly beaten out of the hapless Candide, who learns some of the practical lessons of life while never actually being in danger of learning anything about its meaning and purpose. All in all, anyone who believes in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the empirical philosophy of the good and sensible British school, or any Eastern religion in general, will find their ideas roundly lampooned, insulted, and mocked herein.

Candide starts life in Germany, rattles around Europe, travels to South America and finds El Dorado, gains and looses a vast fortune, returns to Europe, visits Turkey and Persia, and is thrashed by three philosophers in Denmark. The narrative obiter dicta may state that 'In life everything grows wearisome', but the Candide view is: 'Everything is not so good as in El Dorado; but everything is not too bad'. An exhaustingly banal conclusion.

It is difficult to see what positive views are contained in this book. Everyone is denigrated. Nothing is sacred and therefore nothing really matters. Everything finishes downbeat, so this is a dangerous work to read with a too-open mind. In fact, the whole book reeks of what sociologists self-congratulatingly call the 'debunking motif', which explains the tenor of the whole. Voltaire was famed abroad and prolific in his lifetime, but time has proved that trenchantly 'being against things', however right you may be, does not bring a lasting fame worth having. 'Candide' is but a small sliver of Voltaire's life output, and his situation reminds me of the works of the ancient Greek Archilochus, who, a century after Homer and Hesiod was dubbed the first 'poet of blame'. But unlike the classics of Homer and Hesiod, only slivers of Archilochus' works remain to this day, whilst his waspish reputation has survived quite well.


Voltaire's Amusing Intellectual Masterpiece   January 10, 2002
 16 out of 16 found this review helpful

"Candide," subtitled "Optimism" and purporting to be "translated from the German of Doctor Ralph with the additions which were found in the Doctor's pocket when he died at [the Battle of] Minden in the Year of Our Lord 1759," is the single work of Voltaire that continues to be read and recognized as a canonical work of Western literature. A mere seventy-five pages long, it is an amusing and, at times, cruel book that satirically lays waste to many philosophical ideas of its time while simultaneously illuminating the mind, the temperament and the personal conflicts of its author, a man who, perhaps more than any other, came to define the intellectual spirit of eighteenth century France.

At its most abstract level, "Candide" examines the age-old question of why a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god would create a world so afflicted with evil and suffering. This question particularly troubled Voltaire following the great Lisbon earthquake and fire in November 1755, which killed as many as forty thousand people.

Hence, in the very first page of "Candide," the reader encounters one of literature's most famous characters, Pangloss, the learned tutor of Candide, who "gave instruction in metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigology." Echoing the popularizers of Leibniz, the early eighteenth century German philosopher, Pangloss espouses the notion that there cannot be cause without effect, that we live in the best of all possible worlds:

"It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles. Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches. Stones were made to be shaped and to build castles with; thus My Lord has a fine castle, for the greatest Baron in the province should have the finest house; and since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round. Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best."

From the introduction of this philosophical idea, Voltaire proceeds to narrate a dizzying tale (really, a series of tales, like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls or the Arabian Nights) of the adventures of Candide, Cunegonde, Pangloss, Cacambo, and a host of other characters, adventures that include war, torture, dismemberment, and death and utterly confound any claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. At the same time Voltaire satirically challenges certain prevailing ideas, however, he also introduces a plethora of personal, political and historical references, thereby making "Candide" a sort of literary and intellectual cornucopia of Voltaire's thought. In the words of Robert Adams, the able translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of the work, "`Candide' is at the same time a novel of abstract ideas with long, complex histories and a highly personal book, into which Voltaire poured an immense amount of himself-his experiences, his enmities, his learning, his desires, his anguish."

The Norton Critical Edition of "Candide" contains extensive and useful background materials on the text, including valuable discussions of the philosophical ideas adumbrated in Voltaire's tale and excerpts from critical studies, books and letters that have been published over the years since the book was written. Among these materials, "Gestation: `Candide' Assembling Itself", an excerpt from Haydn Mason's 1975 book on Voltaire, is particularly useful in understanding the context in which Voltaire wrote, including the effect that the catastrophe in Lisbon and the Seven Years' War had on his thinking.