Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
About this ebook
As this delightful farce opens, the prim and proper quartermaster Captain Pantoja learns that he has been selected by the army for a secret mission on Peru’s Amazonian frontier. His pride turns to dismay, however, when he discovers that his orders are most unusual: to create a “special service” of women to quench the amorous longings of the recruits in the military’s isolated border garrisons. Pantoja, ever the model soldier, applies the best of his army training to the situation, and he soon has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, whipping his corps into a military machine of unmatched discipline and efficiency. But despite his constant efforts at secrecy, his mission is somehow becoming better known than he—or his superiors—would like. By turns sidesplitting and thought-provoking, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service tells of the complications that arise as word of the remarkable Captain Pantoja and his team of beautiful “specialists” starts to spread.
“Vargas Llosa’s fiction is distinguished by his wit, his taste for irony and his disposition to engage the complexities of existence with an insight that disdains glib moralizing or ideological rigor.” —Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review
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About the author
Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost author and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and in 1995 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His many distinguished works include The Storyteller, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Bad Girl, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Way to Paradise, and The War of the End of the World. He lives in London.
