Candide, by Voltaire.

”There is certainly a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds”. Now I know what PG Wodehouse was talking about with “It’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds, Jeeves” and “What’s that word with a cat in it?” The charmed simpleton Candide living as the pawn of fate, exploring all the topical events of their decade in history, suffering the best and worst of possibilities yet with a personality unaffected by them all is almost certainly the inspiration for Forrest Gump. Has anyone ever noticed that before? Just me, huh.

In turn, the novella shares a certain something with the unbelievable absurdities of Baron Munchhausen, especially around sultanates, ridiculous treasures and bringing back characters who we’d last seen in positions where they had no chance of survival. Its commentary on the human condition is sublimely satirical, like The Little Prince.

Some less oblique skewering is doled out to those who have irritated Voltaire personally, such as the foremost journalists of the age, writing about his plays — The drama critic “who hates everything successful, as eunuchs hate great lovers” and another who “has written only one play, which was hissed off the stage, and wrote only one book, which has never left the publishing house”. There’s the reader who has all the best classics and first editions but for whom no writer is good enough (I think I’ve met that one; and now regret not tying him up and leaving his place with a flapping wheelbarrow).

I love the encapsulation of El Dorado in the single observation that the child urchins in the street wear only faded gold brocade.

This is a fantastic book, in the sense of fantasy, but it is too short to be fully satisfying and some of the metaphors don’t land or didn’t survive translation (red sheep?).

My abiding memory of Voltaire comes from JG Farrell’s doorstop of a novel, The Siege of Krishnapur, in which the defending garrison of the settlement besieged by Sepoys (in 1852) has run out of cannon balls, so they cut the heads off the iron statues of writers and philosophers to fire at the enemy instead. Voltaire’s statue head jams and blows up a cannon because it is a rather awkward oval shape.

I should add the afterthought that Farrell himself died of drowning, off the coast of a bathing beach in Ireland. A gathering of his friends and literary fans on shore could see him out at sea, waving at them. They waved back.