A review by mattperry25
Cândido ou o Otimismo & O Ingênuo by Voltaire

5.0

If, after 257 years, your satire of human nature and contemporary Europeans can still make a 7th grader laugh, you know you did something right. I recently finished reading this book with one of my students, and he thought it was hilarious from the first page. The sheer absurdity of the situations in which Candide, his teacher Pangloss, and other characters constantly find themselves is funny enough, but their stubborn refusal to see the world differently despite their many setbacks and tragedies is what really gets you chuckling. No matter how many new people he meets whose hardships have been worse than his, Candide can’t entirely shake his optimism—or, as the philosophical fashion of the time was called, Optimism. Pangloss has indoctrinated him with the belief that “This is the best of all possible worlds,” and, though he has several moments in which he begins to doubt the validity of this idea, Candide does not fully discard it until the last page, when he finally decides to eschew philosophy altogether for hard work.

Candide is an enduring take-down of dogma, egoism, and superficiality. It critiques society in general, religion, war, colonialism, various justifications for social hierarchies, criticism itself, love, lust, celibacy, philosophy, and the myriad other ways in which human beings hurt, demean, and fracture themselves and their communities. It’s brilliant, still relevant after two and a half centuries, and, yes, very funny.