Written against our own heavy-spirited times, this novel is a free adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide. It’s the story of Candido Munafò, born in Sicily in 1943, when the advancing Allies’ gunfire could already be heard. Candido’s mother runs off with an American, then his father kills himself and he is entrusted to the care of a tutor, the Rural Dean Lepanto, a heretic by vocation, who gives him an education rather modern in spirit. Candido follows in his teacher’s footsteps, experiencing the same disillusionment and alienation from two of the great faiths of our age: Catholicism and Communism.

Candido’s desire for freedom, his belief in himself and the values of his childhood make him part company with Communism, a philosophy that he at one time embraces, in the same way as authentic Christian values push Lepanto to abandon the cloth. Their respective crises de conscience -eventually ensure their freedom but only Candido, ‘child of fortune and happy’, achieves a real spirituality, through a relationship with life that allows him to benefit from it in every way.

All in all a brilliant fable in which irony and narrative inventiveness pave the way for the critique of a stagnant society enervated by ideologies and corrupted by false myths, a society from which only the spirit of liberty and passion for life can save one. Candido has both of these, a ‘love for life like a strong tenacious root’.

‘They stayed together talking until it was evening, until in the now dark room they were separated not only by the table but also by shadows; yet not exactly separated, for their voices had acquired a different afflatus, their talk a new brotherliness. Wealth, poverty... Evil, good... Possessing power, possessing none... The fascism within us, the fascism without... «Everything that we want to combat outside ourselves,» the Archpriest said, «is inside us, and we must first look for it and fight it inside ourselves... I believe that men who know themselves somewhat, who live and are conscious of living, are divided into two big categories: there are those who know that wealth is dead but beautiful and those who know that wealth is beautiful but dead... For me, wealth is still beautiful but more and more dead, more and more death.»’ pp45-46