The New World

Salman Rushdie follows Candide and Cacambo through the South American chapters of Voltaire's Candide: women and monkeys in close proximity, the cook pot, and then El Dorado, the one utopia in a book full of dystopias. He is amused that Latin American savagery turns out to be more savage than European savagery, and reads the cannibalism two ways, literally and as the world eating the values Candide brings. He also raises the puzzle Voltaire never solves: where does the wealth come from, if the people treat rubies as pebbles?

The point Rushdie presses is why Candide leaves. Expelled from his first paradise, he walks out of the second because Cunégonde isn't there; "the two happy wanderers resolved to be happy no longer." Rushdie also names what kind of book this is: a picaresque, with Cacambo appearing from nowhere and Martin replacing him because the story needs him, plotting that would be clumsy in a conventional novel and is the form here. You leave with a word for Candide: pícaro.