Captain Pantoja and the Special Service — Mario Vargas Llosa

From the Nobel Prize-winning author. “In the star-studded world of the Latin American novel, Mario Vargas Llosa is a supernova.” -- Raymond Sokolov, The Wall Street Journal

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