Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.

A couple years ago, journalist Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Turducken is Performative” and received, to his surprise, a response from Judith Butler. First, they complimented his article, then very graciously cautioned him against associating “performative” with fake, clarifying that performance can emulate desired realities, and sometimes even bring them about. It’s funny, yes, that one of the most famous scholars in the world would fire off a note about a seemingly trivial misreading, but having read Gender Trouble, it makes sense: the entire work could be flippantly summarized by the famous Vonnegut quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Of course, it’s more complex than that. Much, much more complex. Gender Trouble is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever completed, not due to Butler’s supposedly-impenetrable prose--I found it dense but generally quite lucid--but because it’s such a thorough investigation and dismantling of a number of theories of sex/gender, most notably Lacan and Freud but secondarily Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Wittig, Irigaray, and structuralist theories of sex/gender as a whole. I won’t attempt to summarize their specific arguments, not that I could, except to say that they consistently tug at one particular thread: is there a pre-symbolic/pre-linguistic/ontological foundation to sex/gender, or are they entire constructed through performance of both socially acceptable and culturally heterogeneous acts?

The structuralists and their immediate predecessors--especially Lacan and Freud--say yes. As I understand it, the origin of both sexuality and language can be found in, uh, incest, the original and strongest taboo. Sexuality is a discursive effect of the repression of the Oedipal desire; because they cannot have sex with the parent, their sexual desires are projected outward toward other members of the opposite sex who can temper but not slake the original desire. Language, on the other hand, grows from the pre-verbal cries of desire, transforming, as the child gains distance from the parent, into other symbols and signifiers, and so on.

Even a cursory reading of the above makes clear the foundational binary at play; there are heterosexual men and women who have heterosexual desires, there are heterosexual men and women who have homosexual desires (caused by the much rarer Reverse Oedipus, really). Ultimately all these desires must either be subsumed in (ersatz?) heterosexual acts or suppressed entirely, because the only alternative is literally madness.

Yeah.

While this may look regressive, the binary is equally strong even in some radical feminist approaches to gender. Wittig, the mother of political lesbianism, makes great headway at dismantling the necessity of heterosexuality but only imagines a wholesale rejection of opposite-sex acts as a response, finally serving only to further establish rejection of heterosexuality as the basis of a new binary, and starting the cycle again. Even Foucault, the thinker Butler seems most in sync with, envisions sex/gender primarily as the abolishment of all sexual identity, resulting in some sort of post-gender paradise, perhaps a nice idea but not one that seems coherent with the way people are.

Butler, on the other hand, thinks bigger. Her ideas are perhaps not as shocking as they once were--though who can say, as we live through Gay Panic 2.0--but it’s still bracing, in 2023, to read about the radical deconstruction and reconstruction of sexual and gender identity in such stark (such as it is) language. A section about how sex is as socially constructed as gender, supported by Foucault’s ideas of gender as a construct of social control, was especially thought-provoking, as it posits that splitting humanity into a binary based on sexual anatomy is just as arbitrary (and no less non-binary) than divisions based on hair color, skeletal structure, or whether one has an innie or an outie--that is, unless the primary purpose of your society is to reproduce the family structure as a means of consolidating power. Then it makes perfect sense to keep the women pregnant in the kitchen while the men go out hunting and gathering and waging war.

A sense of “there is no there there” pervades the last section of the work, in which performativity is presented in its full (at the time) academic form. As I understand it (and as Butler helpfully summarized in her Turducken letter), performance can be oppressive, mandated one’s place in the cultural hierarchy. But they can also be liberative, joyful, constructive, as in a drag show where the absurdities and disjunctions of sex and gender identity are banged together until they break (I understand why drag shows scare conservatives so much now). But even performance is circumscribed by cultural laws and expectations, as Butler discusses below:

The subject is not determined by the rules because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both concerns itself and endorses its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; agency then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.

The above was like a light at the end of the tunnel after two hundred pages of theories that presented sex and gender as either immutable, posited a post-patriarchal society that still used the binary as a load-bearing wall, or critiques that identified problems but seemingly offered no way forward. The answer, Butler seems to say, is to do what we can, to make small changes in the acts of repetition that, after all, form us and the society we live in, until finally we can look around and see that things have changed in meaningful, liberating ways.

On a personal level, a few years ago, I thought my kids would be growing up in a world where aggressive queerphobia was verboten; seeing it make a comeback has been dispiriting in a way I can't describe. In a time when conservatives at home and abroad are targeting sexual minorities, where trans high schoolers are being stabbed to death, where men kill trans women after sex, Gender Trouble is necessary, a dense, difficult work that still sounds like the future. May the future get here soon.

Deconstructing Jacques

Jacques Derrida, who I'm not smart enough to read yet, was an interesting guy. My favorite thing about this review of Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters, however, is its wonderful explanation of one of the key tenants of deconstructionism, exclusion:

Through a series of deft and delicate maneuvers, Derrida sought to show that speech is inextricable from writing, no more or less authentic. The difference between the two depends, as all differences do, on a process of enforced absence or repression: a is a only because it is not b, and thus b is never entirely out of the picture. With the tenacity of a gumshoe, he haunted texts by Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Marx, and Hegel, among dozens of others, exposing the ways in which the subjugated or banished half of a crucial pair—inside/outside, man/woman, reason/madness, signifier/signified—continued to plague its partner.

The rest of the article is well worth reading. Check it out here.

Flesh of My Flesh by Kaja Silverman

Finitude is the most capacious and enabling of the attributes we share with others, because unlike the particular way in which each of us looks, thinks, walks, and speaks, that connects us to a few other beings, it connects us to every other being.  Since finitude marks the point where we end and others begin, spatially and temporally, it is also what makes room for them--and acknowledging these limits allows us to experience the expansiveness for which we yearn, because it gives us a powerful sense of our emplacement within a larger Whole.  Unfortunately, though, finitude is the most narcissistically injurious of all the qualities we share with others, and therefore the one we are most likely to see in them, and deny in ourselves.

One day you will die.  This is an astonishingly hard concept to accept.  Many, I imagine, never do, at least not until death intrudes upon them.  Death is always something that happens to somebody else, not to me--I've even rejected it in this very paragraph, by opening in the second person.  A more truthful beginning would be: One day I will die.

The thesis of Kaja Silverman's book is that the unwillingness or inability to see ourselves as mortal is the greatest cause of suffering, cruelty and violence in human history, and that if we recognize mortality (what she calls "finitude" above") as the essential similarity between all of us--we become capable of the very transcendent experience we seek by denying death.  She calls this "analogical thinking," and traces it through a series of works from Ovid, Leonardo, Rilke,  Freud, Terence Malick, and contemporary painter Gerhard Richter.  Silverman works mostly in a psychoanalytic vein, yet the breadth of the study makes it incredibly persuasive.

The fundamental story of this way of thinking, she argues, is the story of Orpheus, whose gaze at Eurydice banishes her back to a land of death from which he is excluded.  Boldly, Silverman argues that there is an "Orpheus inside every Oedipus," shoving Freud's quintessential human narrative aside to argue for another primal story.

I thought this book was incredible.  I think it ought to resonate with anyone who has felt the fear of death, and especially those of us who have found some comfort in the idea that if it is an inscrutable terror, it is an inscrutable terror that each of one us will face.  For Silverman (and every other atheist critic, to be sure) religion is an offshoot of man's fear of death.  The violence done in religion's name, then, is sadly consistent with its purpose, which is to say, "Death for thee, but not for me."  I'm not willing to go that far, but I think that Silverman's thinking can be accommodated by a believing psyche, as her brief thoughts on analogical thinking in Donne shows.

Perhaps most impressive: Flesh of My Flesh is a rigorous and thoughtful piece of academic criticism that is neither unintelligible nor pointless.  That's a rare breed.

Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

For the beauty of art is the beauty that is born--born again, that is--of the mind...

As old as Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics is, and as outdated as it may seem, it remains relevant because it seeks to answer a question that few have tried to answer: What makes art beautiful?  Or, if the word "beautiful" is too laden with modern connotations, what makes good art?

The modern response, of course, is that the question is rigged, and that art is too subjective a phenomenon to submit its value to objective inquiry.  Hegel, too, recognizes that the question is inextricably bound with the question what is art, but is unencumbered by our anxiety about he very nature of art.

Hegel's model is roughly this: Art draws from the sensuous (that is, perceivable by sight and sound) world, but also "liberates man from his sensuous condition."  A painting of an apple, for example, relies on our sensual perception of an apple, but it cannot be eaten, only contemplated.  Such contemplation actually leads away from mere sensing and consuming and toward the "absolute," the grand meaning of all things.  In doing this, man also contemplates himself, who is a manifestation of this "absolute."  The trippiest part is that Hegel, since he describes man as a part of this absolute, actually brings the absolute to a fuller consciousness of itself--that is, brings God to a fuller consciousness of himself.

Okay, maybe that didn't make too much sense, but there's a lot of nuance involved and it's not really an argument that can be encapsulated.  I only half understand it myself.

Though Hegel is extremely influential, no one probably believes this now.  Most of us simply don't have the capacity to believe in an "absolute," or at least one that operates that way.  But there are parts of this model that strike me as being perceptive and true, especially the idea that in looking at a painting (or reading a poem, or listening to a song) we are really looking at ourselves.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is everything that is the case.

I am fascinated by philosophy, even though I’m barely qualified to read it, let alone write about it. Last year, I tackled Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; this year, inspired by David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, I decided to try some Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has a reputation for being amongst the most difficult of philosophers, second only, perhaps, to Heidigger, and I suspect this is because his philosophy works at such a base level.

Indeed, the primary contribution of the Tracatus is the idea of Logical Atomism which says essentially that all logical statements can be broken down into tiny parts, and then those parts broken down further until at last they reach their “atomic” level, wherein they are recognizable as self-evident tautologies, which Wittgenstein calls propositions. These propositions require no proofs, or, rather, they prove themselves—they are both the statement of a fact and the evidence of said fact. They are self-contained, and by combining these atomic facts, we can construct a logical model that describes the world.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Wittgenstein is careful to point out that having a model that describes the world does not mean that the model is an accurate representation of the world as a whole; rather, it means that the model is one way to describe the world, and this tells us something about the world itself. If we were to discover another model that could describe the world more accurately, this too would tell us something about the world—but the world itself remains essentially unknowable.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Wittgenstein is a relativist. He takes great pains to point this out:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they are both right and wrong. but the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained. The world is independent of my will. Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not against will.

There’s a lot more to the Tracatus, which, even at a slim 80 pages, is quite an undertaking, but I don’t feel like I have a strong enough grasp on Wittgenstein’s big picture to go into much detail about it. That’s ok, though. If philosophy is a search for knowledge, a quest to understand the way the world works, then it seems to me that reading it without understanding it all is sort of the point. The key is not to dissect every word—it’s to learn a way of thinking, a method of inquiry that will slowly expose blind spots and blank slates, and to begin to see the world as a beautiful, mysterious place, capable of inexplicable moments of epiphany and complexity. It’s a way of staying humble, of realizing that there is so much that is unknowable, and so much yet to know.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

As I wake up I think, I should drive north to the lake; as beautiful as it is down here, with my wife and the back garden and the wild roses, the lake is nicer. But then I realize that this is January and there will be snow on the highway when I get north of the Bay Area; this is not a good time to drive back to the cabin on the lake. I should wait until summer; I am really, after all, a rather timid driver. My car's a good one, though; a nearly new red Capri. And then as I wake up more I realize that I am living in an apartment in southern California alone. I have no wife. There is no such house, with the back garden and the high retaining wall with wild rose bushes. Stranger still, not only do I not have a cabin on the lake up north but no such lake in California exists. The map I hold mentally during my dream is a counterfeit map; it does not depict California…

Who is this wife? Not only am I single; I have never been married to nor seen this woman. Yet in the dreams I felt deep, comfortable and familiar love toward her, the kind of love which grows only with the passage of many years. But how do I even know that, since I have never had anyone to feel such love for?
- VALIS

You may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
You may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
-Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads

Aside from something completely narrative-free, like poetry, books like VALIS are the most difficult to review. In some ways, they’re even harder. After all, if I were to describe VALIS in terms of plot, it would probably sound like a fun little sci-fi potboiler: Set in 1970, the story is told through the eyes of one Horselover Fat, whose friends are slowly dying. After one of his closest friends, Gracie, commits suicide, Fat is hit by a mysterious pink laser which provides what everyone wants in light of an inexplicable tragedy: answers. Armed with information, some vague and some specific, Fat attempts to unravel the mysteries of the universe: why is there evil? Who is God, and what is he doing? Is the universe rational? In his search, he comes across all manner of characters, from skeptics and crooks, to prophetic rock stars, eventually uncovering a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the metaphysical ladder.

That’s a technically accurate description of the plot, but it isn’t really a good description of the novel itself. For one thing, Fat is Philip K. Dick, first implicitly and later explicitly, even though he carries on two-sided conversations with Philip, even taking a trip by himself at one point, which probably qualifies him as a most unreliable narrator. Also, all the plot points mentioned above take up maybe a third of the book’s length. The rest is filled with philosophical observations and strange, pseudo scriptural interludes—in fact, the book contains an appendix of Fat’s “inspired musings”, complete with easy-to-reference verses. Long story short: VALIS can be amazingly pretentious.

With that in mind, it’s even more surprising that there are portions of VALIS that are extremely affecting. Fat’s musings about his dead friend and what her death might mean are touching, and when Fat finds the answer he’s looking for—the meaning of it all—it brilliantly undercuts a lot of the pretension. That is, until another late novel twist that could be interpreted as either extremely joyous or sad. Knowing Dick, it’s probably the latter, but it’s hard to tell.

Besides Dick’s self-identification with Fat, it’s hard to overlook the fact that VALIS is based on a real divine experience he claimed to have had. This basis in fact, particularly that Fat’s Exegesis, VALIS’s version of a Bible, is a fictionalized version of a document Dick actually kept—his attempt to unravel the mysteries of the universe. It feels at times like Dick is writing a religious text—indeed, Fat describes his Exegesis as a new cosmogony—so it’s hard to know how seriously to take things.

At times, VALIS is a slog, but it’s redeemed by some well-drawn characters, particularly Fat’s skeptic friend, Kevin, and some of Dick’s uniquely pitch-black humor. There are also a lot of interesting ideas buried in Dick’s synthesis of Christianity, Gnosticism, Buddhism, and about every other religious system you can imagine, but as a religious work, it ultimately feels a bit empty. On the other hand, read as Dick’s attempt to understand and overcome a serious loss, it’s revealing and poignant. Dick was a disturbed man, and his self-awareness is both VALIS’s strength and its Achilles heel. Reading VALIS is like watching a man slowly lose his mind—does that sound like something you ‘d like?

Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard

“Much is said in our age about irony and humor, especially by those who have never been capable of engaging in the practice of these arts, but who nevertheless know how to explain everything.”

I think it’s safe to say that I was not prepared for this book. I was drawn in by the premise—Kierkegaard, one of the fathers of existentialism, writing a treatise on faith, using the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac as his basis—and its length, a scant 95 pages. It sounded right up my alley, but I hadn’t counted on Kierkegaard’s writing style, which is intentionally dense and off-putting to discourage the casual reader (me). So it turns out that this little pamphlet actually took longer to read than the 400 page Robin Hood.

But anyway, on to the content of the book. As mentioned above, Fear and Trembling is a meditation on the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac as recounted in Genesis 22. I say Abraham’s sacrifice because, although God actually provided a ram to replace Isaac, Kierkegaard argues that, in the most meaningful sense, Abraham did sacrifice Isaac since he remained willing up until the final moment, when the ram appeared.

This is one of the most difficult stories in the entire Bible, and Kierkegaard doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions it raises. Interestingly, however, he doesn’t focus on why God would ask Abraham to commit the act, as many theologians do. He rather focuses on Abraham and what his reaction to the request reveals about him and, in the bigger picture, faith itself.

As the conclusions Kierkegaard reaches, I’ll share what I understand of them here, in greatly condensed form. Kierkegaard says that Abraham is the only example of true faith he knows of, and he defines faith in a very complex way which I’m going to try to communicate in a few points:

a) Faith requires a basic belief in the object of the faith. b) Faith requires complete resignation of the finite world into the hands of God, followed by c) a resignation of infinite matters as well, so that d) finite matters can again be appreciated. Further, Kierkegaard argues that true faith requires more than hope, since hope requires a belief that the event believed in will actually happen. Abraham’s faith was true, he says, because Abraham believed that God would restore Isaac to him even though he also believed it was impossible that Isaac should be restored. Kierkegaard points to faith as an example of the absurd: believing that things that will not happen are going to happen is the paradox of faith.

There’s a lot more in this book (the information I described is mostly in the middle third), including some interesting questions about whether or not ethics can be superseded by a divine command and whether or not it is possible to act both within the boundaries of true faith and ethics at the same time (Kierkegaard argues that for Abraham, the ethical choice—that of not sacrificing his son—was actually a temptation away from the absolute best choice of following God’s command), but to be honest, these sections were both interesting and opaque to me.

I don’t really know how to end this review. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’ve exhausted or even fairly explained Kierkegaard’s views in this short post. There’s a lot here, and I may return to it in the future.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton

Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under his feet. Then came slowly the opposite conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been upside down, but now the capsized universe had come right side up again.

G. K. Chesterton is one of those writers I'd always meant to read but somehow never got around to. There's not much excuse for it--he's very accessible, has written dozens of books, most of which are now in the public domain, and The Man Who Was Thursday received rave reviews from both Chris and Carlton, which finally pushed me over the edge.

Thursday starts out like a philosophical novel, with a confrontation between two poets in a park. One of them, Gregory, is an anarchist; the other, Syme, is not. After a verbal battle in which Syme accuses Gregory of not being a true anarchist, Gregory takes Syme on a bizarre tour of the London underground to prove his commitment to his ideology, culminating in an anarchist election, where Syme becomes the titular Thuursday. What happens at the election and afterwards is complex and full of spoilers, but without giving anything too important away, Syme eventually meets the head anarchist, Sunday, and his board of weekday-monikered directors.

It's hard to say much about the plot of Thursday without spoiling it, which wouldn't be as big of a deal if the book weren't so well-plotted. There are compelling philosophical questions at the heart of the novel, but it plays out like an absurd comedy until a surprisingly touching final act. The questions of chaos vs order and good vs evil are present but the ultimate question the novel poses is less obvious and, again, too much of a spoiler to mention here.

I'd love to do more in-depth analysis but a) I'm not sure I have any great insights and b) it would only decrease the enjoyment that anyone reading this review would get from the book. It's free, it's short, it's funny. Read it.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on `explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on `seeing through⁵ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to `see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through' all things is the same as not to see.

The Abolition of Man is not a novel. It's a collection of three essays that were derived from a series lectures Lewis presented. The book is only about 130 pages long (and the pages are fairly liberally margined), but it's full of content. To anyone used to reading Lewis' lighter theological works such as Mere Christianity or his fiction, the density of the text will probably come as a surprise. After all, it's not everyone who desires to read a hundred page dissertation on relative morality.

However, to reduce the book to another argument on relative-vs-absolute truth is to do it a disservice. Lewis looks at the problem from many angles and agrees that, while truth must be interpreted, there must exist a base truth, which he calls the Tao, from which other truth is derived. Interestingly when one considers Lewis' extensive apologetic work, Abolition is not a particularly Christian text at all, and Lewis mentions his personal beliefs only once, addressing what he assumes will be a common objection to his ideas.

Overall, the density of the book makes it hard to recommend to casual Lewis fans, but the whole thing is available online here, if anyone is interested.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

I really enjoy taking reading recommendations from people. If you ask a friend to suggest a book for you to read, and they actually give it some thought, chances are the book will tell you something about your friend. To the Lighthouse is another in a long list of books that have been recommended to me in the last couple of months.

Let me start by saying this was not a particularly easy book to read. Many times I would decide to put the book down and go to bed, then realize that I had only read eight or nine pages. I think the best word to describe it is dense. Much of this stems from Woolf writing style. It is very stream-of-consciousness. She moves abruptly from one character to the next--often without warning--leaving it up to the reader to determine who she is writing about.

The book is split up into three parts. The first, and the longest, takes place at the summer beach house of an aristocratic British family. Throughout this section, Woolf supplies her readers with glimpses into the minds of her characters, of which there are many. Mr. Ramsay is a professor of philosophy, and brought some of his brighter student with him to the beach house. There is Lily Briscoe, and a young painter who is enraptured with the Ramsay family. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay also have a number of children.

The second part of the book is cold, almost sterile. Woolf describes the now empty, nearly abandoned house, without sneaking a peak into the mind of anyone, save the maid. A few years have passed since the first section (I am not referring to the rate at which I was reading.) and many changes have come. That is all I will say.

For the final section we are back in the minds of the primary characters. Much of the time, we see the world from the perspective of Lily Briscoe. She doesn't seem to realize that the reason she is never satisfied with what she paints while at the house is because she is trying to capture the essence of the Ramsay family.

The book is really much better than this review makes it sound. Simply describing what takes place does the book injustice, since the plot is really minimal to the work. What made To the Lighthouse so enjoyable was Virginia Woolf's writing and insight into the human psyche. As a friend, I recommend that you read this.

Candide by Voltaire

Candide was recommended to me by Liz, another Fifty Booker, a couple of years ago. I knew that it was a work of satire, but beyond that, I had very little knowledge of the book.

Translations are extremely important in works such as this. The bookstore that I normally go to had about four different editions of Candide, so I pulled each one off the shelf and compared them side by side. This edition, translated by Leo Cuffe, was far superior to the others. The primary reason was the detailed endnotes (I wish they had been footnotes, instead) that helped to explain some of the passages whose meaning I no doubt would have missed. At many points the satire can only be fully appreciated with some specific knowledge, for which the endnotes were a valuable resource.

The book follows a young man by the name of Candide (Hey, that's the title of the book!) on his many misadventures. Throughout the book Candide's general outlook on life, that this is the best of all possible worlds, is continually tested. At times Candide is disturbingly graphic. Horrific fates befall many of the characters of the book.

Although it is only about a tenth as long, and was published nearly a century and a half later than Cervantes epic masterpiece, Candide bears many similarities to Don Quixote (a book that I am still working on). Both authors use their works to publicly skewer their enemies and critics, often without much subtlety. Much like Candide, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are repeatedly presented with wild coincidences, such as running into friends they thought were dead, or encountering neighbors even though they are far away from home. This may be a tenet of satirical works of this period, for all I know. I am not that smart. Luckily you don't have to be too awful smart to enjoy this book.

Although at time bordering on naivete, there was something endearing about Candide's optimism. As he and his companions were faced with each calamitous incident, I found myself genuinely hoping that things would work out well for them. Do things work out well for them? Well, you'll just have to read it and decide for yourself.