With his last novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa surprised many of his admirers by joining the literary carnival. Prior to this dizzyingly playful account of an army officer assigned to supply a party of prostitutes to deprived jungle soldiers, the author had produced a stark short-story collection, translated as The Cubs, and three long, increasingly complex novels, The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral, all exploring with a near-savage seriousness and single-mindedness themes of social and political corruption. In the novels, Vargas Llosa employed with great skill a variety of narrative techniques (fractured chronology, interlocking stories, shifts in point of view, cinematiclike cuts, parallel and contrapuntal dialogues) that turned the old social-realist novel upside down and inside out. Though narrative experimentation was still very much in evidence in Captain Pantoja, a new, unexpected element...