As critics have noted, in the early 1970s Mario Vargas Llosa was a man in transition from one set of political beliefs to another, but he was also a novelist in search of a new complexity, and he found it for a while in a genre that was not his first choice: comedy. His achievements in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) are all the more remarkable because the writer was, in several respects, turning away from what he knew. At the same time he was anxious not to be disloyal to his past, and in comedy he discovered a means of expressing certain truths that continued to lurk in realms of encroaching falsehood. Captain Pantoja reminds us of the closeness of mania to certain kinds of virtue; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter ironically celebrates an art that escapes madness, but only just.

In a 1999 prologue to Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Vargas Llosa tells us that the novel is based ‘on a fact’, ‘a real event … that I got to know well during two trips to the Amazon’, and that his early drafts were very different in tone from the final, and quite wonderful result. ‘As incredible as it seems … in the beginning I tried to tell this story seriously. I discovered that was impossible, that the story demanded farce and laughter’.