The Finale

Salman Rushdie brings Voltaire's Candide to Constantinople, where Cacambo has traced Cunégonde to a sultan's household and Candide finds her no longer beautiful. Does he still marry her? Rushdie won't spoil the answer, or the two returns on the galley, but he says one thing about the ending: after all the drama, melodrama, horror and magic, it is quiet. A small world where the adventurers step out of history and cultivate their garden.

Then Rushdie asks what that ending tells us. Is engagement a mistake, and a glass of wine and a good book the wiser course, or is hiding in a corner its own kind of mistake? He thinks it matters now, with history moving at the speed of an express train, and he won't answer it for you: Candide finds his solution, readers find theirs. He closes on satire, the twinkle and the shrug that let a reader bear very dark matter, and on why a 260-year-old book still lands: human nature is what it is.