REVIEWING ZADIG:

This is an excellent tale, echoing the manner of the Arabian Nights, filled with amusing episodes and light philosophical insights. I may be ambivalent about the story’s moral, but the character of the eponymous orotagonist is heroic in his quests and honest in his struggle to meet his outrageous challenges in a world filled with pain and frustration, not least being the betrayals and stupidities of our fellow men . . . all the while trying to puzzle out the nature of Fate. Its inspiration never flags.

It is worth mentioning the full title of the edition I read: Zadig, or Fate. Voltaire’s Deism shows in a revelation towards the end, with an angel offering the secret why a world with so much suffering exists. Very interesting. Today’s besotted youngsters might be amused to learn that Diversity Is a Sign not of Our Strength . . . but of the Creator’s.

This is not a novel. Voltaire tells his story in the manner of ancient tall tales, not in the modern novelistic style with its characteristic attention to moment, aiming to induce the reader into the soul of the protagonist, whether hero, victim or anti-hero. There is no “interiority” here. Do not read it expecting anything like a modern thriller or popular novel, and most especially a classic novel such as Silas Marner and Fathers and Sons. This is a droll tale in the olden style, but with Voltaire’s wit woven in to leaven the lump.

I highly recommend Zadig. Every literate person should be familiar with this form of fiction. I believe it would properly be called an “anatomy,” to use the terminology of Northrop Frye, taken from Richard Burton. The ancient term is Menippean satire. Some of my favorite writers engage in this genre: Lucian, Denis Diderot, Aldous Huxley, and James Branch Cabell. But I also acknowledge and honor the more popular form of the novel, now standard. Yet, as I grow old, and soak up our civilization’s scattered stores of wisdom — wringing them out, periodically, in the course of my many follies and foibles — I find my taste for reveling in the arts of feeling, of streams of consciousness and flows of tropisms, wane.

What waxes, instead, are the dazzling philosophical perspectives of Lucian and Cabell. And Voltaire. ( )