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Ah, Candide, can it be? 250 years old already? Happy Birthday!
To celebrate the anniversary, an exhibition called "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success" is on display at The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
The exhibit, continuing through April 2010, touts Voltaire's original manuscript of Candide (on loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France), plus other Voltaire relics and memorabilia from the 1956 Broadway production.
Are you a Candide fan? Check out Alan Walker's review of the work in Penguin Classics on Air.
Also, here are a few questions taken from our Candide Reading Group Guide - share your answers by adding a comment to this post with your responses!
- Immediately upon leaving Eldorado, Candide and Cacambo encounter a slave who has had a leg and a hand cut off. He tells them, "It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe" (p. 52). What relationship is Voltaire suggesting here between happiness and suffering, between the best of all possible worlds and the worst of all possible worlds? How might Voltaire make this point if he were writing today?
- In what ways does Voltaire's satire extend beyond his own time? What would Voltaire think of our own age, for example? What aspects of our thought and behavior might he satirize most fiercely? What kinds of political, philosophical, and religious hypocrisy are most prevalent today?
- At the end of the novel, Martin says, "Let us set to work and stop proving things, for that is the only way to make life bearable" (p. 93), echoing the Turkish farmer who says, "our work keeps at bay the three great evils: boredom, vice, and necessity" (p. 92). Do you think Voltaire is endorsing this view? Why would doing physical work be preferable to the life of a philosopher?
Candide Voltaire The New York Public Library exhibition 250 Anniversary Penguin Classics on Air Bookclubs
