Cover of Candide by Voltaire Audiobook Candide
Audiobook · Adelphi Press

Candide

Author
Voltaire
Read by
Oliver Adams
Language
English
Length
3 hours 13 minutes
ISBN
9781787366121
Published
13 March 2023
Imprint
Adelphi Press
  • Satire
  • Enlightenment
  • Philosophy
  • Optimism
  • Pessimism
  • Tragedy
  • Hope
  • Europe
  • South America
  • War

All titles

Description

Pangloss says this is the best of all possible worlds; Candide is expelled and the world answers with war, earthquake, and disease. Hear Voltaire’s satire unabridged in English: optimism on trial, Lisbon, Eldorado, a garden at the end that is work not theory. Adelphi audiobook. The tutor’s maxim, the disasters, the stubborn hope that will not die even when it should. Listen to a European joke that still cuts. Cultivate the garden — after you have heard why the slogan failed.

Author

Voltaire (1694–1778) made French prose feel like a blade you could pocket. Candide moves too fast for consolation: earthquake, war, and a garden that is not a philosophy so much as a last useful sentence. The letters, the tales, the long public quarrel with superstition — they share one climate. Ridicule here is not decoration. It is how a mind stays free in a crowded century.

More by Voltaire

Other editions