Candide

Candide: Or Optimism was actually one many satires written during the Enlightenment age that attacked the traditional views on society and religion with refuge in audacity- from the UK, we also had Jonathan Swift and his short essay, A Modest Proposal (Spoiler: The proposal involved eating Irish babies!). Candide was first published in 1759 by French philosopher and satirist Francois Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire. Keep in mind that back before the French Revolution, this was at a time when the French were either dirty and living off the streets or rich and obnoxious, sipping on tea and wearing flagrant wigs along with their white dresses and makeup. Judging from that picture above, it's pretty easy to guess which category he belonged to.

This Voltaire, on the other hand, preferred black.

Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz was a German theological philosopher who famously proposed that the world we live in was the "best of all possible worlds" that we could possibly live in, and that everything that happens, even all the evil in this world, is an end that justifies the means.

The ends also justified his hair.

Voltaire called bullshit, however, and gave his rebuttal by creating a novel where an optimistic character has everything bad happen to him all at once. Oh, and Liebniz himself is represented in the novel as Candide's teacher, Pangloss. He's the one who gets venereal disease by bonking one of his students. He does it again later in the book. Also, he's an idiot, if that wasn't subtle enough.

Alright, if you don't want me to spoil the book for you (not that I haven't been doing a magnificent job doing just that), then DON'T READ THIS.

So the book starts with Candide, a bastard son living in the castle Westphalia, being taught by Pangloss about the aforementioned lesson on optimism. Things start well with Candide- that is, until he's kicked out for having an affair with Cunegonde, the Baron's daughter. Things just go downhill from then on as utter tragedy befalls him and everyone he ever loved- his once-home ransacked and massacred by Bulgarian soldiers, his love raped and brutally murdered, his beloved teacher hung before his eyes during an Auto-da-fe, and just total misery everywhere he looked.

Despite all of this, Candide manages to keep his unchecked optimism and goes on a quest to marry Cunegonde. Yes, the one who was raped and murdered before. She's actually alive. However, as I mentioned before, she was put into slavery, and was last bought by a Jew, who Candide kills in order to set her free. They later run away to South America for a new life, along with an old lady who was also raped and lost one of her buttcheeks in an act of cannibalism. However, once there, she runs off to marry the governor of Buenos Aires, and is promptly not seen until the end of the book.

Anyway, Candide teams up with Cacambo, who you can just think of as a cynical version of Baba Looey from The Quick Draw McGraw show, and they run into Cunegonde's brother, who managed to escape the massacre to become a baron. Things are well and good between them, but when the baron reveals his disinterest on Candide and Cunegonde being together (even though she's already married?), Candide kills him in anger. He later escapes Buenos Aires and totally has a bunch of adventures of different places, such as France, England, and fucking El Dorado. Oh, and the teacher's alive- he and the baron (yeah, he's alive too) have been enslaved in Constantinople, along with Cunegonde and the old lady, who are both now considerably ugly. He buys all of their freedoms so that they can find a place to be at peace, except that nobody really learned a lesson out of all this- Pangloss is still sexually deviant and hopelessly optimistic while the baron still won't let Candide marry Cunegonde. The story ends with everyone living on a farm, only moderately happy after the entire experience, with the message that you must "cultivate your garden". Yeah.

Oh, and did I mention that this book is only 75 pages long? Because it totally is.

Needed more editing, dammit!

So yeah. You should probably read it. Because, you know, it's awesome.

Surprisingly, there's been very little. There are absolutely no major films (or tv series) that ever captured Candide's exploits- but there has been a musical. Yes, composed in 1956 by Leonard Bernstein (aka the West Side Story guy), the operetta has been written and rewritten several times because, apparently, Voltaire is just that difficult to capture in song- oh, and it's also famous for that song Glitter and be Gay, which Cunegonde sings after, you know, being raped.

Kristen Chenoweth's breasts as Cunegonde

I've never seen it personally, but I'd like to, mostly to understand how the hell they went through the pacing of the novel. To put this into perspective, in the show, Candide doesn't get kicked out of Westphalia until about 6 songs (and one delightful Overture) in. In the book, this event happens ON THE SECOND GODDAMNED PAGE!

But that's ok, and for now, it's the only thing we have to live with. But I'm just saying- this book would probably make the most kickass mini-series ever made. You hear that, TV executives? You need to get on this shit!