Paradise, Lost

Salman Rushdie opens Voltaire's Candide: a castle in Westphalia so pleased with itself that it cannot see how small it is, and a resident philosopher, Pangloss, who teaches that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Rushdie reads the castle as a paradise built for demolition, follows a stolen kiss to its enormous consequences, and finds two meanings hiding in the hero's name. Then the war arrives, played perfectly deadpan, and Rushdie names the question underneath the jokes: if goodness protects no one, what actually decides a life? He has an answer, and it is not a comforting one.