A few months ago I read the second part of the adventures of Juan Planchard, a book that I enjoyed so much when I read it, that when I had the digital edition of the new installment, I devoured it in one day.
With this review I make my first publication in this community, I hope that when you finish reading the post, you will be convinced to look for these two novels immediately.
At the moment there are two books published, the first one is called The Adventures of Juan Planchard and the second one The Revenge of Juan Planchard. Both have been a complete literary success for the author. The printed edition is completely sold out in the few bookstores that exist in Venezuela, according to what I have been informed by friends who live in Miami, it is also difficult to get a printed edition there. Sales on Amazon, however, have been excellent and many have bought the digital edition.
What is the reason for this success?
The novel deals with a subject that is too hot for Venezuelans, it is a journey into the sewers of the corrupt and totalitarian system that has been in place in Venezuela since 1998 and that those of us who inhabit this piece of land, live and suffer daily.
Through the first person narration of the character Juan Planchard, we will accompany him in all his adventures and experiences. Planchard is a character who has decided to stop fooling around and take advantage of the system. He is a lion, not a lamb. He is a hunter, not a prey.
Juan Planchard is a young man of humble origins, who made the decision to become a rich man without caring about anything or anyone. He is a bolichico, a term used in Venezuela to identify all the people who joined the government to eat their share of the cake. From being a nobody he became a Boligurgues (another term used in Venezuela), getting into the dirtiest and most corrupt businesses imaginable. Juan Planchard has no scruples, he just wants money and all the pleasures of being a millionaire.
The language is direct, with vocabulary and expressions common to Venezuelans, which is best understood if you are an inhabitant of Caracas, the capital of the country. The street vocabulary, the inappropriate words, the insults, the Venezuelan lexicon, is present in all the narration that Juan Planchard gives us.
This was something I loved, it gives veracity to the story. The characters who are delinquents (malandros) speak with their criminal street lexicon. It is not a novel where a delinquent raised in the worst neighborhood in the world is going to say phrases of a recent Harvard graduate. No. A mistake made by other authors, who seem to be afraid of using the common and wild language of the people, and use stilted phrases.
Can anyone who is not from that country like this novel?
Yes! absolutely. Because The Adventures of Juna Planchard and its sequel has all the elements to be enjoyed by everyone: they are short novels, the protagonist is an anti-hero, it has all the genres, humor, action, adventure, sex (a lot), crime, politics, corruption, espionage, etc.
The use of technology is present in both novels, with parts where we read Whatsapp chat, text messages, tweets and emails, using a cinematic style in each chapter of the novels, making it impossible to stop reading and devour the next chapter quickly.
The two books are a beastly thriller that will take you by the hand to know the most incredible and amazing stories, a trip around the world, with real and fictional characters mixed in a plot that unveils the most perverse crime ever committed in Venezuela, the theft and destruction of all the wealth of a country.
The author describes everything without hiding or making concessions, everything we read is painful, in my case being Venezuelan, at the same time that I laughed with his black humor, I felt a deep pain, because the reality is worse than what is told in the novels.
The Adventures of Juan Planchard
The first book was published in 2016 and Juan Planchard tells us about his origins. He is a millionaire who enjoys his wealth, parties, drugs, unbridled sex, friendships in the high spheres of power, friends in Hollywood. His wealth comes from plunging an entire country into misery. He will meet a beautiful "gringa" who will drive him crazy, we will discover how he managed to become a millionaire, his relationships with the most important ministers of the government, even his meeting with the commander in chief of the Bolivarian revolution. But not everything will be happiness, circumstances will push the character to be involved in an adventure full of action and violence, where the greatest tragedies of his life will also occur. Not everyone is who they say they are and each chapter is full of surprises, reaching a final chapter with a great cliffhanger that will leave us looking forward to another new adventure.
The revenge of Juan Planchard
Some years have passed, Juan Planchard must return to the country, I will not say the reasons for not making spoilers. Many things have changed, after the death of the leader of the revolution, Maduro is the new president and narco-corruption is now bigger. Planchard still thinks about the "gringa" he still loves her, but his priority must be to fulfill a dangerous mission. In this book there are still hilarious situations, but it also has a more serious tone, there is more pain, embroidering the crisis of food shortages, people eating out of the garbage and the migratory effect that made millions of Venezuelans flee the country. In addition, Juan Planchard will now have something that will completely change his perception of life. He has also suffered and will have to get back into an adventure with extreme violence, to save the most precious thing he has in his life.
In the second novel, the author does something that I hope to be able to tell him someday, how much I admire him for it. There is a real character in his novel, whom he turns into our first action hero, American style. You don't know how much I enjoyed all those chapters, because that character, that man existed in real life, he was a real hero, and he was killed in the most vile way possible. Oscar Perez, our hero, our martyr. And the author paid him a great tribute in his novel, I could not help crying in each of the chapters where the character appears. Thank you Jakubowicz for giving him the tribute he deserves!
The novels have been a success, but the cultural elite of the country, those great writers whose books do not sell, take a dim view of these novels. Because of the type of language, the excessive violence, the sex and the descriptions of the life of politicians and boliburgueses that appear in the two novels.
I already saw this kind of prejudice in 1998 when Alejandro Rebolledo (deceased in 2016), who had directed the youth weekly Urbe, published the novel Pim Pam Pum, which became a cult work. On another occasion I will tell you about that book.
But the market speaks, the reader speaks, the sales success is indisputable.
Will there be a third adventure of Juan Planchard?
Although the writer has stated in interviews that his wish would be not to have to write more about this character, the events of the country in the coming years will determine whether he writes a third novel. I am sure he will. As things end in the second book, readers want another installment of Juan Planchard, one that closes the cycle, both the fictional story and the real story.
Does Juan Planchard exist in real life?
The author has said it many times, Juan Planchard is a fictional character, but that his adventures are based on thousands of real people who have made their fortunes during these two decades of narco-dictatorship rule. In an interview, he said that many people tell him that they know someone identical to Juan Planchard. Others have told him anecdotes about the lives of these millionaires, which he has used to create the character and the whole plot of his novels.
Who is the author?
The author of the novels is Jonathan Jakubowicz, a Venezuelan filmmaker who in 2005 made the extraordinary film Secuestro Express, which put his finger on crime and violence in the country. It is one of my favorite Venezuelan films. His contacts with Elizabeth Avellan and Robert Rodriguez have helped him make a career in Hollywood. He directed Hans Os Stone, a film about boxer Mano de Piedra Durán, with Edgar Ramírez and Robert de Niro in the cast. And last year he released Resistence, starring Jesse Eisenberg. The Adventures of Juan Planchard was his first novel, so his narrative style is very cinematic.
I hope to see these books adapted into a movie or TV series in the future, I assure you that will happen someday. I'm sure it's in the author's plans. At the moment, there is a theatrical adaptation, directed by Moisés Kaufman, which has been a great success and has been very well received by the public who have managed to see it in the United States.
I invite you to read it, you will laugh, you will be moved, you will hate Juan Planchard for everything he did and represents, but you will also come to love him for everything he has to do for his loved ones. You will enter a sea of sensations that you will enjoy, but you will also find painful. You will not be able to be indifferent to everything that happens in the two books, if you are from Venezuela it will be a torrent of emotions that will leave you ecstatic and devastated. If you are a reader from another country, you will be amazed by everything that is told, which is nothing more than the representation of a reality that is even worse than fiction.
I hope you enjoy reading these novels. See you soon.
