Candide

Read this on a flight because it’s short and I figured I’d finally clear a classic off the list without much time commitment. About four hours if you just sit down and read it straight through, which tracks with what other people online said, and I was entertained for maybe the first sixty of those pages before I felt like I’d gotten the joke and Voltaire just hammered the point home nonstop, over and over.

The target is Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” optimism, and the method is just relentless, almost comic escalation, characters get maimed, enslaved, hanged, and then the dead ones keep coming back with their own stories a few chapters later, barely an explanation, and each disaster gets met by Pangloss insisting everything’s still working out for the best. That structure is genuinely funny the first several times, and it does get repetitive in the miserable tragedies that keep befalling Candide, and of course that’s the point. It’s a machine built for one specific point, though, and once I understood the machine, watching it run for another hundred pages started to feel less like satire and more like the same lever being pulled over and over.

I will say the buttock story stuck with me, an old woman’s several-page recounting of having her buttock chopped off to feed an army captain, told with total deadpan seriousness, which is the kind of thing that shouldn’t work and somehow does purely on commitment to the bit. And there’s a real edge underneath the absurdity, actual slavery, actual religious violence, played completely straight even while everything else gets exaggerated for effect, which is an uncomfortable combination that I think is doing exactly what Voltaire wanted it to do.

I don’t regret reading it, and I get why this slim little tome has survived two hundred and fifty years as the go-to answer to “what is satire supposed to look like.” I just wanted it to trust me a little sooner that I’d gotten the point, rather than illustrating it a dozen more times before letting Candide finally decide to just cultivate his garden.

Three stars. Important, funny in bursts, more thesis than novel.