I read this in one sitting on a night when I’d been bored by whatever was on TV and pulled it off the shelf instead, which feels like the correct way to encounter Candide, no ceremony about it. It moves fast, almost rudely fast, Candide gets attacked, loses a buttock, gets hanged, un-hanged, watches everyone he loves die and then not actually be dead, and Voltaire treats every one of these disasters with the same flat matter of fact tone that makes them funnier than they have any right to be.

The target is optimism, specifically the Leibniz flavor of it, the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, and Voltaire spends two hundred pages making that idea look ridiculous by piling on catastrophe until it buckles. What I didn’t expect was how much the ending would land. After all that, the whole cast just ends up gardening, tending their own patch instead of philosophizing about whether the patch is theoretically the best possible patch, and that’s the entire moral, delivered without a lecture. It’s the rare satire that trusts you to get there yourself instead of underlining the point three times.

It’s short, which I mean as praise, not a knock, plenty of eighteenth century novels could stand to lose two hundred pages and this one already knew that about itself. The pacing is closer to a series of increasingly absurd anecdotes than a plotted novel, which I’ve seen some readers dock it for, but I think that’s the joke working as intended rather than a structural flaw. Four stars, and I’d hand it to anyone who’s ever wanted to yell at someone for saying “everything happens for a reason.”