Candide
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Good
One of the most wickedly brilliant works of satirical fiction ever written, Candide follows its wide-eyed, hopelessly optimistic young hero through a relentless gauntlet of disaster — war, earthquake, inquisition, and betrayal — as Voltaire systematically dismantles the fashionable philosophical optimism of his age, most pointedly the Leibnizian doctrine that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 under a pseudonym and immediately banned across Europe, this razor-sharp novella chronicles Candide's picaresque journey from the idyllic castle of Westphalia to the streets of Lisbon, the salons of Paris, and the mythical golden city of El Dorado, each misadventure more grotesque and darkly comic than the last. Voltaire's genius lies in his devastating economy of prose — every sentence is a loaded weapon, fired with the precision of a master satirist at the hypocrisies of religion, the brutality of war, and the vanity of human pretension. This edition, translated by the celebrated Tobias Smollett and illustrated by Antoni Clavé, brings an added layer of literary and artistic prestige to a text that has lost none of its subversive power in over two and a half centuries. Presented as part of the Oxford Library of the World's Great Books, it stands as an indispensable cornerstone of the Western canon — a work that leaves the reader laughing, unsettled, and quietly questioning everything.
Author: François Marie Arouet Voltaire
Format: Hardback
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Good
One of the most wickedly brilliant works of satirical fiction ever written, Candide follows its wide-eyed, hopelessly optimistic young hero through a relentless gauntlet of disaster — war, earthquake, inquisition, and betrayal — as Voltaire systematically dismantles the fashionable philosophical optimism of his age, most pointedly the Leibnizian doctrine that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 under a pseudonym and immediately banned across Europe, this razor-sharp novella chronicles Candide's picaresque journey from the idyllic castle of Westphalia to the streets of Lisbon, the salons of Paris, and the mythical golden city of El Dorado, each misadventure more grotesque and darkly comic than the last. Voltaire's genius lies in his devastating economy of prose — every sentence is a loaded weapon, fired with the precision of a master satirist at the hypocrisies of religion, the brutality of war, and the vanity of human pretension. This edition, translated by the celebrated Tobias Smollett and illustrated by Antoni Clavé, brings an added layer of literary and artistic prestige to a text that has lost none of its subversive power in over two and a half centuries. Presented as part of the Oxford Library of the World's Great Books, it stands as an indispensable cornerstone of the Western canon — a work that leaves the reader laughing, unsettled, and quietly questioning everything.