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Salman Rushdie on Voltaire's Candide

Episode 8

The Mutilated Slave

Featuring Salman Rushdie

Audio episode · 10 min

Salman Rushdie on Candide

Candide walks out of El Dorado with more wealth than any king in Europe, and on the road into Surinam he meets a man who is missing a hand and a leg. Salman Rushdie reads chapter nineteen of Voltaire's Candide, the page where the book's laughter goes quiet, and stays with what the man on the ground says about where sugar comes from. Then the conversation turns. Rushdie remembers being not quite fourteen, newly arrived at an English boarding school, a boy from Bombay who had never been anybody's stranger before. What does a schoolyard teach you about an empire?

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