Candide

Every terrible thing that can happen to a person happens to Candide, repeatedly, and he keeps surviving to have more terrible things happen to him, which sounds exhausting on paper and somehow reads as one of the funniest things I’ve picked up all year. Voltaire isn’t attacking optimism in some vague feel-good sense, he’s going after a specific philosophical claim, Leibniz’s idea that this is necessarily the best of all possible worlds because a perfect God couldn’t have made a worse one. Every atrocity in the book is Voltaire pointing at that claim and laughing.

The Eldorado chapter is the one everybody remembers and for good reason, it’s the single stretch where things actually go well, a hidden utopia with no religious persecution and streets paved in what everyone else in the world is dying over, and Candide leaves it voluntarily because he can’t shake his attachment to Cunégonde. That choice is the whole satire in one gesture, people choosing familiar suffering over unfamiliar peace.

Structurally it’s got a Don Quixote feel, episodic, picaresque, one absurd misfortune after another, but rougher and bloodier than Cervantes ever gets, buttocks get chopped off to feed soldiers, characters die and come back, everyone ends up somewhere worse than where they started. It shouldn’t be readable as comedy and somehow is, because the prose moves so fast you don’t get time to dwell on any one horror before the next one arrives.

Short enough to finish in an evening, dense enough to reread with something new landing each time. Four stars, docked slightly only because the back third repeats its own joke a few times more than it needed to.