Candy by Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Candy
Book Review: Puerile and dated
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm sure this book was once considered shocking (shocking!), now it seems simply dated and puerile. Writen in see-the-cat English, you won't need a dictionary for this one. There is one saving grace though, I now know where the ending for the movie "Dr. Strangelove" comes from. It's on page 60 of "Candy." Dr. Strangelove said: "Mine fuhrer ... I can WALK!" and Candy said: "Look, Doctor, I can ... COME!" So it might be worth a quick read for that, but I don't recommend paying full price for it.Book Review: Starts strong but falls apart
Summary: 3 Stars
It said that Southern brought on Hoffenberg because he couldn't figure out an ending and it really shows. It starts with classic Southern writing but falls off. Its like the movies me and my friends made in middle school when we couldn't figure out an ending and everyone died in the end. I don't want to spoil the end, but it's not great. The first half is essential for any hardcore hipster of the day.Book Review: Voltair Exposed
Summary: 5 Stars
A truly remarkable and very modern rendition of Voltair's Candide served in a form that bored lit students might appreciate. First published in Paris by the Olympia Press as Lollipop, the name was changed to allow its continued publication when the first title appeared on the French Banned List. I read it in Paris in the mid fifties before attending college and came to appreciate its message denouncing philosophical optimism even before I had even heard of Voltair. Hilarious. Illuminating. Still a good read in this time of socially enforced political correctnessBook Review: What Parody Should Look Like.
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this when it first appeared, then again, for only the second time, just recently. It's still frankly hilarious, if not quite as shocking as it was then. It was written in the 1950s before the loose-limbed values of the 1960s governed our aesthetic tastes. What seemed sexy, and even dirty, then, seems less breathtakingly smutty but equally outrageous.
Terry Southern, we have to presume, is responsible for most of it, including the somewhat nebulous allusions to Voltaire's "Candide." ("Candy" is a parody of a parody.) His fingerprints are all over the jokes. Even his invented metathesis -- "prevert" -- appears here, before it showed up in his screenplays for "The Loved One" and, most notably, "Doctor Strangelove."
In some of his other writings, the intended humor could become offensive, at least to me. Jokes about President Lyndon B. Johnson's manhandling of the body of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy went too far.
But nothing to worry about in "Candy." A gorgeous, sexy, blond college girl is convinced by one of her professors that people need to learn to GIVE to others, to share their warmth. (Remember, this is before Flower Power.) Here's a description of how Candy Christian's debauchery begins. I've deliberately picked the first, most "decent" example. I've had to substitute caps for the italics in the original text. And Mephisto, an allusion to Goethe, is one of many winks in the direction of high-brow fatuousness.
Professor Mephisto paced about the office intoning:
"To give of oneself -- FULLY -- is not merely a duty prescribed by an outmoded superstition, it is a beautiful and THRILLING privilege."
He sat down again, and put a hand out to the girl, as though in an effort to express some extremely abstract feeling, but then finding it ineffable, let it drop, as though it were useless to try, onto her knee.
"And the burdens -- the needs of man," he said with soft directness to her, "are so DEEP and so -- ACHING."
Candy involuntarily shuddered just slightly and looked down at the big fat hand on her leg -- though, of course, she did not see it as that.....Professor Mephisto gave her knee a little squeeze before withdrawing his hand.
It gets much worse. Or, if your taste in comedy is as warped as my own, better. Southern sets up situations -- and these truly made me laugh out loud -- in which ordinary middle-class conventions are violated, not by violence as in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but by eruptions of the most foul vulgarity. And one of the most amusing conceits of these episodes is the reaction of the proper people standing by and observing. If a young woman at a table in a fancy restaurant gaily asks the astonished waiter for a serving of piping hot male organ, the other diners may look slightly uneasy and remonstrate in the mildest manner -- "Now, Livia, I do wish you'd watch yourself." Thorne Smith used a similar comic device in dealing with invisible spirits. When the rear half of an otherwise invisible dog shows up at a restaurant in "Topper" the other customers grow a little nervous and try to avoid staring at the lone wagging tail.
There's no point in describing the plot. It's made up of episodes related to one another only by the presence of Candy's naive hero -- she probably belongs in the same category as Candide and Huckleberry Finn, according to Northrop Frye -- and by the increasingly surrealistic events in which she finds herself. She winds up on her belly in a collapsing Tibetan temple with her father violating her from below and the shiny nose of a giant statue of the Buddha nudging its way into her derriere. I'm not afraid of giving too much away because, once you've grasped where Southern is headed, there's not much to give away.
I also got a kind of kick out of it the first time around because Candy visits a couple of real bars in Greenwich Village that I was familiar with at the time, including the San Remo, described in the text as containing some 275 homosexuals when a police car crashes in through the window. It wasn't entirely gay when I knew it. A large oil portrait hung behind the bar and the grinning subject, holding a big cigar, looked exactly like Ernest J. Lubitsch.
It's not a masterpiece. It moves recklessly from one episode to the next. Of course "Ulysses" is episodic too, but Joyce had more on his mind than skinning the phony intellectual pretensions of the time while they were still alive and spastically kicking.
Book Review: What about the movie?
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this extraordinary novel about 20 years ago and still thinking it is five stars. I've tried several times to get a copy of the movie that displays a very eclectic cast: Marlon Brando, Ringo Starr, Walther Matthau, John Astin and the unforgettable Ewa Aulin -beautiful- as Candy. I hope Amazon will soon make the effort and put this hilarious film for sale. I will be one of the first buyers, no matter the price.