Candide by Voltaire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stop hoping for the best and work at it.


It’s wild that a satire written over 260 years ago can still be so readable and funny. It veered a bit too far into gnostic waters for my taste, but that was understandable considering what it’s satirizing (Leibnizian optimism). I can see why Voltaire was/is so lauded and loathed.

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One of my favorite parts was a scene in Chapter 22 that poked fun at critics. I decided to give it a rewrite for this review:

Lindsey happened to be seated near some fashionable readers. This did not prevent her laughter at the well-written scenes. One of these Goodreads critics at her side said to her between chapters:

“Your laughter is misplaced; that is a terrible book; the writer who wrote it is yet worse; and those who praise his writing are still worse than him. The author never once went to El Dorado, yet there was a scene set in El Dorado. Moreover, he is a man who does not believe in innate ideas; and I will private message you twenty articles written against him that prove he is anti-Christian as well as a homophobic and racist bigot. ”

“How many books are there on Goodreads, my friends?” said Lindsey to her estimable fellow readers.

“Millions.”

“What a number!” said Lindsey. “How many good?”

“Fifteen or sixteen,” replied the Goodreads crowd.

𐡸 𝔏𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔯 𐡷

“Who,” said Lindsey, “is that great pig who spoke so ill of the piece at which I laughed, and of the writer who gave me so much pleasure?”

“He is a bad character,” answered another reviewer, “who gains his livelihood by saying evil of all plays and of all books. He hates whatever succeeds, as the eunuchs hate those who enjoy; he is one of the serpents of literature who nourish themselves on dirt and spite; he is a folliculaire.”

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.