In the Library
Candide
Voltaire, 1759
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Original
- Original fr
- Chapters
- Chapters 30
- Length
- Length 32k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
We must cultivate our garden.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
The best of all possible worlds, Dr. Pangloss keeps insisting, even as that world hangs him, shakes Lisbon to rubble, and flogs his hapless pupil across two hemispheres. Voltaire wrote this little book in something close to fury and dressed it as a romp: earthquake, auto-da-fé, war, slavery, plague, each fresh catastrophe narrated at a sprint and with a perfectly straight face, until the comfortable doctrine that all suffering is secretly for the good lies in pieces on the floor. The marvel is how funny it stays while doing this, how lightly it carries its anger. Candide loses everything he was promised and keeps walking anyway. Then, after every grand system has failed him, arrives the quietest and most famous sentence in the book: we must cultivate our garden. Stop trying to justify the world; tend your own small corner of it. Read it in a single sitting, the way it was built to be swallowed whole.