I fear these last few entries are going to be even more of a mess than usual. I apologize in advance, but I'm desperately trying to make the deadline. I'm currently reading my last book, but I still have four more entries to write up!
Voltaire's satire Candide tells the tale of its eponymous antagonist, a man who blindly embraces a philosophic viewpoint of The Enlightenment known as optimism. Based on the ideas of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, optimism embraces the idea that God has made a perfect world, and any imperfection we find in it is due to a lack of knowledge of the greater good that imperfection serves. In other words, we live in "the best of all possible worlds" and "all is for the best." Voltaire ruthlessly satirizes this point of view, heaping upon the characters maladies and misfortunes of such a comically gruesome and pointless nature as to defy any explanation as to what greater good they might serve.
Candide is a young man who lives in Westphalia in the castle of a Baron, where he studies philosophy under the tutelage of Pangloss, a fervent proponent of the school of optimism. Caught making out with the Baron's daughter, Cunégonde, he is banished from the castle. Shortly thereafter he is conscripted by the Bulgars to fight. When he is caught away from his regiment, supposedly out for a stroll, he is accused of desertion and is flogged so brutally that every bit of skin is flayed from his back. Candide recovers, however this is but the first in a series of horrible misfortunes the characters of the book encounter, each one more comically gruesome than the last. Candide's adventures take him all over Europe and as far as the New World, wear he encounters El Dorado, a remote, almost inaccessible land where there are no wars, no one is imprisoned, and the streets are littered with gold and jewels. Candide eventually leaves El Dorado with a vast fortune, but what he does not squander he winds up losing to swindlers and thieves. It is this loss of fortune more than any of the physical grief he has encountered which causes Candide to question his blind optimism.
The characters of the book are deliberately underdeveloped and unrealistic. They are caricatures, stand-ins for various points of view. Pangloss serves as a surrogate for Leibniz himself. Candide is comically naive and impressionable, blindly following the teachings of Pangloss. Cunégonde represents idealized womanhood in Candide's eyes, but while she professes feelings for Candide, she is quick to discard those feelings and use her sexual assets to her advantage. Martin is a pessimist who sees only bad in the world, which seems almost as extreme as Pangloss's relentless optimism. It is only Cacambo, a valet that Candide acquires on the way to South America, who shows any real honesty and depth of character.
This was a short but interesting read, although one has to do a little background research to fully appreciate it. This book is a relentless attack on Leibniz's ideas, and so therefore a cursory knowledge of those ideas is helpful in understanding some of the humor. I think it was helpful that the version I read was a modern translation by Peter Constantine, and had a well-written introduction which provided some of the background necessary to appreciate the text. I've never read any other Voltaire, and while the satire and the use of pun-ish names seem a bit heavy-handed at times, I'd have to say that overall I enjoyed the book.
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