Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa – the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian writer – is a delightful farce from the author of The Feast of the Goat and The Discreet Hero.
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In this delightful farce, the prim and proper Captain Pantoja is sent to Peru’s Amazon frontier on a secret Army mission – he must find females for the amorous recruits. Yet complications arise as word of his achievements starts to spread, and he finds himself battling against his wife, religious zealots and the Army that gave him the mission in the first place.
Through a wonderfully comic montage of letters, military documents, radio broadcasts, dream sequences and dialogue, Mario Vargas Llosa’s Captain Pantoja and the Special Service combines political satire with humour, morality with uproarious sexuality.
In the star-studded world of the Latin American novel, Mario Vargas Llosa is a supernova.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He also won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honour in the Spanish-speaking world. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter as well as several collections of essays, journalism and plays. He died in April 2025.
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