12/11/21

Date approximate - only read Candide ( )

Candide, one of Voltaire's most popular works, is a sociopolitical satire in which the author uses the misadventures of the book's titular hero to argue against the philosophy of Leibnizian optimism. The gullible and naive Candide suffers through repeated misfortunes, often inspired by real historic events (Seven Years' War, Lisbon Earthquake), organizations (Jesuit Order, Portuguese Inquisition), individuals (Admiral John Bying, Abbe Trublet), and even the mythical land of El Dorado.

This novella is bildungsroman coming-of-age narrative, and while many people compare it to Gulliver's Travels due to the scope and variety of Candide's travels, I was personally reminded of Samuel the Speaker by Upton Sinclair, which also features a young man whose world philosophy is constantly contradicted by the world itself. The

Personally, my favorite companion of Candide's is the Manichaean scholar Martin, whose level-headed pessimistic view of mankind as a world full of idiots drives his frequent recommendations of throwing people out of windows and into oceans.

Candide is fast-based and unrelenting, an epic journey in novella form full of black humor and theological debate as it tackles the concept of good versus evil and the nature of mankind.

Worth reading because of candide. Ingeneous was good then messed up on the last paragraph, and Zandig was interesting ( )

In this philosophical fiction, Zadig is a young nobleman in Babylon who has everything going for him. He is rich, smart, just, sensitive, and caring. And yet, every time he tries to do something good, a series of coincidences and misunderstandings conspire to have him punished. Fate being as it is, he ultimately escapes punishment after punishment, only to once again find himself jailed, torn away from his true love, hunted and/or enslaved.

Voltaire is an excellent satirist, and the footnotes in my copy of the book point out many parallels between the characters in Zadig's Babylon and Voltaire's contemporary French court. While my knowledge of Enlightenment history is pretty vague, I still found Voltaire's jabs at his rivals to be entertaining and his pokes at bureaucracy to be timeless. While this story is somewhat of a philosophical and political fable (which makes it sound kind of dry), it is also very very funny, insightful, and a quick and satisfying read.

The same can be said for the selected short stories also included in this volume. Although he sometimes gets a little bogged down in the religious feuds between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, in many of the stories Voltaire focuses his keen eye on social and philosophical issues that still ring true today.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2009/02/zadig-1747.html ] ( )