Finding a book that gets me reading without stopping is very hard for me, especially those books of old literature which are the ones that I hate the most. I thought this was going to happen with "Candide", but in fact, the complete opposite thing occurred. As I read, I could perfectly picture what was going on in my head, not to mention how interesting the book was. Since the beginning of the book, I could clearly notice the four elements of satire: irony, hyperbole, target, and absurdity. The author´s tone creates a lot of sarcasm, so at times the reader does not know if he is talking seriously or sarcastically.
In my opinion, this book connects to "The Odyssey" by Homer. What made me realize this at first was the time period and the situation. Since they are both very old works, I connected them right away and noticed the following similarities: The main character leaves home, and suffers because the woman they love can´t be with them. In "The Odyssey", this happens with Ulysses, when he leaves Penelope, and in "Candide", this happens when Candide has to leave Lady Cunégone behind as well. Something else I found similar was the fact that as the book advanced, they seemed farther away from the woman they loved. In "The Odyssey", Penelope had tons of admirers and was slowly losing hope on meeting with Ulysses again, and in "Candide" Lady Cunégone dies of sickness. I found the imagery from both texts very similar, especially then these two main characters have to go through after they go home. But how does this make the imagery similar? The situations Ulysses and Candide go through in their journey are very ironic. For example, when Ulysses goes to Circe, and how she turned his men into pigs is very unrealistic, even though she is a witch. A situation from "Candide" I could connect to this was when the boat where Candide, James, Pangloss, and other men were in broke in two after suffering a mayor storm, and how ironically they were on their feet in no time the only ones that survived (except for James, who fell and drowned), and ended up walking in a sea of dead people.
The irony Voltaire uses is also one if the things that really caught my eye and found very interesting, because I had never had the chance to read a book with such diction and expressions. For example, when Pangloss is talking about Panquette and says "In her arms I taster the delights of Paradise, and they produced these hellish torments by which you see me devoured." (p.30). I found this very ironic and in a way contradictory because paradise is a timeless place, in which everything is positive, no harm is felt and nothing goes wrong. However, Pangloss feels this when he is with her, enjoying it, but it is ironic how he says it produced some "hellish torments", as if the pain of being with her were all that he wanted, yet it can´t be paradise because he suffered and she died, meaning that everything ended, so it was not timeless.
From what I've read so far, I have really liked the book and it has helped me analyze texts at a higher level, not looking at the situations in the literal sense that they are written but to look beyond for a better understanding. I really like how there is a problem and it is solved right away, and a worse problem emerges. That is what makes the book a page turner and makes me interested in it.
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