Candy

by Mason Hoffenberg, Terry Southern, Maxwell Kenton

Book Overview

Banned upon its initial publication, the now-classic Candy is a romp of a story about the impossibly sweet Candy Christian, a wide-eyed, luscious, all-American girl. Candy -- a satire of Voltaire's Candide -- chronicles her adventures with mystics, sexual analysts, and everyone she meets when she sets out to experience the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802134297
• ISBN13: 9780802134295
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Tongue-in-Cheek Piece of Work!

I LOVED this book! I think the other reviewers may not have completely understood the jest of the book. Yes, it was definitely a shocker in it's day because of the sexual content, but I thought it was very humorous. These two writers definitely put a story together very wisely. Obviously, they were using tongue-in-cheek humor all through the book. Indeed, there were some dramatic points, but more than anything if one takes the view of the book in the context of, maybe, the style of Monty Python, one may look at it with a different perspective! Highly recommend!

Clever and disarming satire!

This is one of the cleverest satires I have read in a long time. In this wickedly funny and provocative novel, Candy chronicles her pursuit of normalcy when she abandons her eccentric family. What follows is a hilarious twist after another as Candy encounters doctors, sexual analysts, yoga gurus and relatives. The sexual implications and content in this novel (too explicit to describe) are thought provoking, funny and disturbing at the same time. It is no surprise that Candy was banned from various countries. Terry Southern writes with irony and unsentimental prose -- a force to be reckoned with. Are you in the bargain for a satirical and dark read? Pick up Candy!

A Close Encounter with "Candide"

Having read Candide first, reading Candy was purely accidental, a fluke, or perhaps a dare, but part way into the book I recognized its inspiration, and enjoyed it immensely from then on. It is truly hysterical, as was the original Voltaire. Candy, however, includes snippets of ideas from other Classics: read it for yourself to see if you can guess each chapter's parent story. I have enrolled in a course that requires the reading of Candide - I am recommending Candy to the instructor who has never read it!

Candy: The girl-Quixote of sexual innocence

This book is a masterpiece of contemporary society observation and criticism via a modern lovely and supersexy pin-up girl's adventures in starting to face the facts of life, specially the sexual ones. A jade jewel of a book.

"Give me your hump!"

Southern's tour-de-force follows the innocent, beautiful Candy Christian as she runs sexually afoul of a whole bunch of scheming, horny men. Since she is pure and giving, she wants to please them, but gee whiz! Are they ever strange! "Candy" was banned in the United States in the Fifties and received its first publication in Paris. Southern and Mason Hoffenburg, an American poet, admitted that they had written the book primarily to make money, since churn-'em-up pornography was what Olympia Press chef Maurice Girodias was paying for. Of course, the book became so much more than a cutesy best-seller: it was the satire of the century, throwing wide-eyed, white-skinned Miss America into a den of the great bugaboos of the time (including a Jewish doctor, a hunchback, and Daddy!). Read it till its thunderous and pulsating conclusion.