Candide By Voltaire

David Wootton's scalpel-sharp translation of Candide features a brilliant Introduction, a map of Candide's travels, and a selection of those writings of Voltaire, Leibniz, Pope and Rousseau crucial for fully appreciating this eighteenth-century satiric masterpiece that even today retains its celebrated bite.

The hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm.

"The story of Candide, a naive youth who is conscripted, shipwrecked, robbed, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live, is accompanied by four other stories"--NoveList.

Translated and illustrated by Nicolae Sfetcu. A philosophical tale, a story of a journey that will transform the eponymous hero into a philosopher. An important debate on fatalism and the existence of Evil. For a long time Voltaire has been fiercely opposed to the ideas of the philosopher Leibniz concerning God, the "principle of sufficient reason," and his idea of ​​"pre-established harmony." God is perfect, the world can not be, but God has created the best possible world. Evil exists punctually, but it is compensated elsewhere by an infinitely great good. Nothing happens without there being a necessary cause. An encouragement to fatalism. Voltaire opposes to this optimism that he considers smug, a lucid vision on the world and its imperfections, a confidence in the man who is able to improve his condition. In Candide, Voltaire openly attacks Leibnizian optimism and makes Pangloss a ridiculous defender of this philosophy. Criticism of optimism is the main theme of the tale: each of the adventures of the hero tends to prove that it is wrong to believe that our world is the best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire’s masterpiece of satire Candide was written between July and December 1758 and published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam in January 1759. The events in the book unlike most works of fiction are astutely based on the current state of Voltaire’s contemporary world and culled from the headlines of his day. No major power center was omitted. Arbiters of social status, sex/love, money, war and religion were all lambasted within the pages of Candide.