The Old World

Salman Rushdie takes up the old woman's story in Voltaire's Candide, the tale inside the tale that says to Cunégonde, in effect, "you think you got it bad? Listen to this." He reads it as Voltaire's argument staged as drama: an absurd universe where terrible things happen over and over for no reason, set against Pangloss's best of all possible worlds. He also reaches the Italian sentence that delighted him at 16, and says it aloud without translating.

Then Morocco. Voltaire, having just shown Europe hanging, burning and massacring its way through the Seven Years' War, now wants to tell us how barbaric Africans are, and Rushdie puts a question mark against it: a contradiction inside the text, and racism to set beside the anti-Semitism. He also notices what the plot has done to Candide, who started as an innocent abroad and has quickly become a murderer with very little remorse. You leave for the New World knowing the holy fool is also a killer.