Candide

About the book

Candide grows up accepting his teacher Pangloss's assurance that events belong to the best possible arrangement of the world. Expulsion from a sheltered household sends him through wars, disasters, exploitation, and a succession of astonishing encounters. Voltaire gives suffering a disconcertingly brisk narrative pace, using sudden reversals and exaggerated coincidences to test explanations that remain confident regardless of the evidence. Candide's attachment to Cunegonde supplies a continuing personal aim amid the larger argument. Other travellers bring different habits of judgment, making the journey a contest between ways of interpreting experience. The satire targets the comfort of systems that explain away harm, while its restless movement raises a practical question: how might a person act usefully when certainty about the world's underlying justice proves so difficult to defend?

• Optimism
• Suffering
• Practical judgment

Why read it

For fast, unsettling comedy that makes philosophical certainty answer to a relentless succession of inconvenient events.

English translation