The Earthquake Argument

Salman Rushdie knows the earthquake in Candide is real, and it changes how you read the joke. He sets Voltaire's plot against the catastrophe that shook Europe's faith in a well-run universe, and against the furious poem Voltaire wrote in its aftermath, which he finds and reads aloud. Before Lisbon, a lesson in wrongheadedness: why nobody in this book can be argued out of anything, and what bleach injections have to do with Pangloss. After Lisbon, the Church stages its remedy for earthquakes, and Rushdie decides the target of these chapters is bigger than religion. It ends with a hanging and, of all things, a rescue.