Not Irrevocably Dead

A Turkish galley, two slaves who cannot row, and a face Candide last saw at the end of a rope. In the closing chapters of Voltaire's Candide the dead start coming back, and Salman Rushdie wants to know why the book barely bothers to make it plausible. His answer runs through a rainstorm that arrives twenty-two chapters late, a film about a man who is only mostly dead, and, strangest of all, modern physics, which has lately been siding with the philosopher this whole book set out to humiliate. Pangloss comes back with a secret, too. It changes how you read every word he says.