CAPTAIN PANTOJA AND THE SPECIAL SERVICE
197815917New York City NY: Harper & Row 1978. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket. New York City NY: Harper & Row 1978. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 245 pages. The author's fourth novel. Now considered a late-modern classic. The first appearance of the title in English and in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. Presents Mario Vargas Llosa's "Captain Pantoja And The Special Service" in a felicitous English translation. Described by Raymond Williams the most important literary critic/scholar on the author as "the discovery of humor". It consists of brilliantly depicted vignettes that document the relations between Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas. The technique of "interlacing dialogue" seamlessly conflating two conversations that occur at different times which Vargas Llosa perfected in "The Green House" is used once again this time for comic effect. While "The Green House" is serious in tone "Captain Pantoja And The Special Service" is its parodistic mirror-novel. Mario Vargas Llosa was the writer/intellectual/philosopher par excellence among the Latin-American geniuses of the so-called Boom: He refused to be categorized labeled and reduced by ideology whether it is Fascist conservatism political correctness or Leftist academicism what he condemned as "authoritarianism of the Left and the Right". He considered himself an heir to the great European cultural tradition yet his work is firmly grounded in Latin America's not just his native Peru's history and mythology. His aesthetics and literary practice - Vargas Llosa embraced and appropriated every literary genre - prompted Roberto Bolano his greatest successor to consider him an inescapable influence among a handful of others on contemporary Latin-American literature. That is to say to be a Latin-American writer is to become a Classical master of language and a Modernist artist writing in language of the highest quality and reinventing literary form and convention at the same time. Literary genres are inventions of a particular culture's idea of imagination and storytelling "templates" that Vargas Llosa transformed into "poetic tales" in Harold Bloom's brilliant phrase . An absolute "must-have" title for Mario Vargas Llosa collectors. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in black pen-marker on the title page by Mario Vargas Llosa. It is signed directly on the page itself not on a tipped-in page. This title is a late-modern classic. This is one of very few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing American still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean crisp and bright. Please note: Among "Boom" writers Mario Vargas Llosa has been grossly under-valued for the longest time. The collectible value of his books will not only keep but keep going up. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the Cervantes Prize awarded to the greatest living writers in Spanish by the Spanish Government in 1994. Winner of the Jerusalem Prize in 1995. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine copy. SEE ALSO OTHER MARIO VARGAS LLOSA TITLES IN OUR CATALOG. ISBN 0060144947. Harper & Row hardcover
Modern Rare · États-Unis110,00 $US≈ 93,07 €
