CANDIDE AND ZADIG

CANDIDE, Voltaire's 1759 novel, resembles in some ways an old Warner Bros. cartoon—in its frantic pace and zest, its wit and sarcasm, its target audience of adults, and its characters' inability to be killed by the most ghastly violence. When Dr. Pangloss proudly recounts the pedigree of the syphilis that rots him away (he traces the virus back to Columbus's sailors), Neville Jason slurps his syllables in a wonderfully cartoony way. On the whole, Jason performs this classic with the required straight face (or voice), which conforms to Voltaire's aim of using the wide-eyed, naïve Candide and the matter-of-fact narration to mask a philosophical work about suffering and human evil. ZADIG, Voltaire's 1749 novel of comparable length, lives in the shadow of CANDIDE but is also especially accessible in Jason's reading. G.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2009]