Voltaire’s brilliant satirical assault on what he saw as the naïvely
optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, Candide, or Optimism is a dazzling
picaresque novel, translated and edited by Theo Cuffe with an introduction by
Michael Wood in Penguin Classics.
Brought up in the household of a German Baron, Candide is an open-minded young
man whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief, inspired by
Leibniz, that ‘all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds’.
But when his love for the Baron’s rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide
is cast out to make his own fortune. As he and his various companions roam over
the world, an outrageous series of disasters befall them – earthquakes,
syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder – sorely testing the young
hero’s optimism. In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the
philosophical views of his time, to create one of the most glorious satires of
the eighteenth century.
Theo Cuffe’s translation brilliantly conveys Voltaire’s acerbic humour. In his
introduction, Michael Wood discusses Voltaire’s satirical attack on
contemporary philosophy. This edition also contains a map, extensive notes,
table of dates, further reading and appendices including extracts from
Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.
François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), better known by his pseudonym Voltaire, was
a French writer and satirist, the embodiment of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment. Among his best-known works is the satirical novel Candide (1759).
If you enjoyed Candide, you might like Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also available in Penguin Classics.
‘The prince of philosophical novels’
John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run
‘[An] excellent new translation’
Robert McCrum, Observer”