Books : Candide (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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Author name: Voltaire

: Candide (Barnes & Noble Classics)
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9781593081782
ISBN number: 1593081782
Label: Barnes & Noble Classics
Manufacturer: Barnes & Noble Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: January 06, 2005
Publishing house: Barnes & Noble Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 155270
Studio: Barnes & Noble Classics



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Product Description:
Candide, by Voltaire, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
 
One of the finest satires ever written, Voltaire’s Candide savagely skewers this very “optimistic” approach to life as a shamefully inadequate response to human suffering. The swift and lively tale follows the absurdly melodramatic adventures of the youthful Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunégonde, and tortured by the Inquisition. As Candide experiences and witnesses calamity upon calamity, he begins to discover that—contrary to the teachings of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss—all is not always for the best. After many trials, travails, and incredible reversals of fortune, Candide and his friends finally retire together to a small farm, where they discover that the secret of happiness is simply “to cultivate one’s garden,” a philosophy that rejects excessive optimism and metaphysical speculation in favor of the most basic pragmatism.

Filled with wit, intelligence, and an abundance of dark humor, Candide is relentless and unsparing in its attacks upon corruption and hypocrisy—in religion, government, philosophy, science, and even romance. Ultimately, this celebrated work teaches us that it is possible to challenge blind optimism without losing the will to live and pursue a happy life.

Gita May is Professor of French at Columbia University. She has published extensively on the French Enlightenment, eighteenth-century aesthetics, the novel and autobiography, and women in literature, history, and the arts.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Man creates hell for his fellow man right here on earth
This novel is very short, requiring less than 4 to 6 hours to finish, depending on your reading speed. It is a satire that attempts to explore a specific aspect of human existence - why is it that human beings suffer? This may sound simple but the answer to such a question also then evokes questions around the existence of God and whether meaning is created by mankind or given by the Creator.

The characters a two dimensional and cartoons, as they should be in a satire meant to explore concepts rather than to be a novel with fully developed characters for purposes of character analysis. Candide is the eternal optimist in love. Professor Pangloss is the eternal abstractionist, unable to see reality unless it is framed within some conceptual system. Much is made of associating Pangloss with Leibnitz. Who can say? These two have adventures after adventures experiencing the acquisition of great fortunes and then the loss of these fortunes, both through accident and chance happening.

Candide travels across Europe, to South America, back to Europe. Along the way he sees vast social injustice created by social and economic inequities that are supported by both the noble and religious castes as the will of God. We see rape used by the military troops of all sides of a conflict. We see man created famine due to unequal distribution of resources and opportunity. We see warfare and torture engaged in for the most idiotic of reasons. We see great plagues and earthquakes that create conditions where man can be wolf to man once again. We see floggings and other forms of punishment that are meant to restore the social order but which are so arbitrary that they in fact undermine the social order they are suppose to support. We see criminal behavior at the highest social levels as well as the lowest. Kings and generals operate under the same principles as thieves, murderers, and pirates in this novel.

All these wild events go by very fast, each only lasting a page or two before another great calamity hits. We are then introduced to the final message of the novel which is that only those who tend their own gardens and find meaning in work are capable of weathering the vast storms of human suffering that plague all men and women during our lifetimes.

It is a classic. It is certainly odd by our current standards of literature. I came away from the novel less convinced of the final messages about tending my own garden and more convinced of the ability of man to create hell for other men with little empathy or foresight.



Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - HILARIOUS if you understand the language!
I read this book forever ago in high school, and fell in love with it! It really is absolutely hilarious, but you have to be able to understand the language and the satire behind it. Great for school reports for your history or French Lit classes!


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - A stunning critique of rationalism
Voltaire is still recognized as one of history's greatest satirists, and after reading Candide it's not hard to see why. Two and a half centuries later, it still has the power both to amuse and to shock.

On the surface, as has often been noted, Candide is obviously a critique of the philosophy of Liebniz, and especially of the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds and everything is as it had to be in order for this to be so (in accordance, presumably, with the plans of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent Creator). Voltaire goes quite over the top in showing the misadventures and misfortunes that befall his befuddled hero, who at very first whole-heartedly buys into this "optimism."

Eventually, Candide's tale concludes with his advice that we should all just tend to our gardens--the precise meaning of which has been widely (and wildly) speculated about. Many take it to be a rejection of philosophy as such as being entirely useless, and we should just take a more pragmatic approach to life, though I find this interpretation untenable. More likely, given what we know about Voltaire as an Enlightenment thinker and from the content of Candide itself, it is simply a rejection of one philosophical school, namely that of rationalism. This is wider than just Liebniz, and Voltaire does target the ideas of other major rationalists (e.g., Descartes) as well. The message seems to be that philosophy is useless *when it has nothing to do with, and is in fact contradicted by, our actual experience.* The ending then suggests a much more practical sort of philosophy, like the one represented in America by Voltaire's contemporary Benjamin Franklin, but it is a philosophy nonetheless.

In the end, this is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking story that is still very relevant in today's world, and should still be required reading for everybody.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - A MARVELOUS WRITER...
CANDIDE TEACHES US THAT SUFFERING MAY BE THE ONE THING THAT BRING US ALL TOGETHER.
THE MISERY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION IS NO NEWS TO ANYBODY, BUT TO BE REMINDED EVERY ONCE AND A WHILE IS NEVER A BAD EXERCISE.
WHOEVER THE CREATOR WAS, HE MUST HAVE MADE SOME KIND OF A MISTAKE, UNLESS WE ASSUME OUR SUFFERINGS AS THE ONLY AND UNAVOIDABLE PATH TO COMPASSION.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Voltaire at his most sarcastic
This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A great story and important historical work in literature. Voltaire was a Renaissance Christian humanist who played a role in the development of the Enlightenment.

On the one hand, the structure of his novel Candide is Homeric, it is the journey narrative, the hero with a thousand faces, but it is a satirical restructuring of that classical motif of the hero on a quest. What is the importance of the quest in Candide? What is the quest about in the classical sense? The quest is about learning. In the classical sense the hero leaves, has to acquire some sort of knowledge, learn a set of skills that is going to help him or her enact the quest surmount the obstacles that they encounter at one point or another, and the finally what does the hero have to accomplish? What is out there the "Holy Grail" The prize, the whole quest is about attaining some sort of ultimate end or some sort of ultimate knowledge. Does it end there? No, you got to go back with that knowledge, because the quest is never just about attaining the goal, it's about bringing it home to make everybody better, to restore the community. The individual quest, the heroic quest in the classical sense always has a larger social corrective end. The purpose of the individual, the function of the individual all depends on his ability to return to the collective, whatever it is that he has found that he has acquired that is going to change the way things are. Now how does that compare to the journey or quest narrative in Candide? Contrary to the notion of what prepares us for the world, OK here is the important structure of the journey or the quest, and the critique of knowledge by Voltaire. It is contrary to the idea of the knowledge that we acquire prepares us for the world. That each new bit of knowledge that we acquire, prepares us for the subsequent step, and prepares us for the subsequent stage. Contrary to the idea that life is somehow to be understood or that human history is somehow to be understood as a journey organized around progress, around betterment advancement acquiring new knowledge more knowledge more science more learning, we're getting better again, Candide tells the story that goes in the opposite direction. So, then you acquire knowledge and then you spend the rest of the journey finding out that the knowledge is useless, bit by bit, and every lesson you've acquired has to be cast aside, everything you learn you have to abandon. Instead of gaining and getting better, it is throwing off, letting go, and getting worse. Where does Voltaire want us in the end to think of the notion and narrative of progress?


Of course, you know that Candide is steeped in so many of the political and philosophical controversies of the 1750's. One of his big critiques is of the philosopher Leibnitz who said that `this is the best of all possible worlds," the idea championed by Leibnitz was a simple version of the philosophy espoused by enlightenment philosophers that the existence of any evil in the world was a sign that god was not entirely good or very powerful. The idea of an imperfect god would be nonsensical. So if you are a philosopher who takes for granted that god exists, you would have to conclude logically; and here is where humanities and Christianity really start messing with each other in all kinds of obvious ways, that god is perfect if you logically conclude that god exists. Therefore, his creation, the world, and man must also be perfect. According to many enlightenment philosophers, people perceived imperfections of the world only because they do not get the plan. This is a teleological idea of the world. Now obviously Voltaire does not accept this theory, or that god or any god has to exist. Therefore, he makes fun of the idea that the world is completely good. Much of the novel is a satire addressed to the notion that the optimists who witness countless horrors and unbelievable injustice such as floggings, robberies, and earthquakes will always find a way to write it off. They will say, `oh well there must be part of a plan, even though none of these calamities seem to serve any good at all it must point to human cruelty ignorance and barbarism and points to the indifference of the natural world. Pangloss the philosopher in the book throughout the story is always trying to find some justification for the terrible things that he sees and the arguments that he makes seem increasingly to be absurd, like his quote that "Syphilis needed to be transmitted from the new world to Europe so that Europeans could taste new world delicacies. What other things is Voltaire criticizing here that connects to some of the debates that define the enlightenment period of the 1750's Religion? Religion- He criticizes the whole hypocrisy of religion. In the book, Voltaire has a parade of corrupt hypocritical religious leaders who are like ... Read More

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