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You can't win 'em all. Captain Pantoja's Special Service is a brothel for the Peruvian army in the Amazonian basin. The book is a mixture of satire and slapstick comedy, but not really even close to the writing quality on The Time of the Hero, The Green House or Conversation in the Cathedral that proceeded it or Aunt Julia and The War at the End of the World which succeeded it. I only found it marginally humorous and could not help but be put off by its outright misogyny. Whatever, I will still continue to read other books from Vargas Llosa, this one is clearly not his at his finest.
I learned that - in fact - this was based on a true story and there is a famous movie about this story. Perhaps I'll need to re-evaluate my review sometime by watching the movie and re-reading the book. I also learned that this kind of "secret service" was very common in South America - near coal mines, etc.

Fino's Mario Vargas Llosa Reviews:
Fiction
The Cubs and Other Stories (1959) TBR
The Time of the Hero (1963)
The Green House (1966)
Conversation in the Cathedral (1969)
Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1973)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)
The War of the End of the World (1981)
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1985)
Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1987)
The Storyteller (1989)
In Praise of the Stepmother (1990)
Death in the Andes (1996)
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998)
The Feast of the Goat (2001)
The Way to Paradise (2003)
The Bad Girl (2007)
The Dream of the Celt (2010)
The Discrete Hero (2015)
The Neighborhood (2018)
Harsh Times (2021) TBR

Non-Fiction
The Perpetual Orgy (1975)
A Fish Out of Water (1993)
Letters to a Young Novelist (1998)