The Rum Diary : A Novel
by Hunter S. Thompson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Hunter S. ThompsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-11-01
ISBN: 0684856476
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Accessories:
- Fear and Loathing in America : The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist
- Screwjack: A Short Story
- The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
Book Reviews of The Rum Diary : A Novel
Book Review: Great first novel...
Summary: 4 Stars
This was my first Hunter S. Thompson "reading experience" (I'm not sure if seeing the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas truly counts as having experienced him) and I have to say...I'm officially intrigued.
For a first novel, this book was exemplary, but if it had been one of his later works, I probably wouldn't have been quite as impressed. The main character, Paul Kemp, seems a bit undeveloped/underdeveloped, and I don't agree with the jacket description that it is a love story. What it IS, is an amazing picture of an on-its-way-to-being-Americanized Puerto Rico, and an amusing portrait of the crazy young fools who populate that place. I give it 4 out of 5 stars :o), but I will caution that if you are expecting a big climax and an official ending...this may not be the book for you.
Summary of The Rum Diary : A Novel
Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels.
"Disgusting as he usually was," Hunter Thompson writes in this, his 1959 novel, "on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard." Surprise! Thompson isn't writing about himself, but one of the other, older, aimlessly carousing newspapermen in Puerto Rico, a guy called Moberg whose chief achievement is the ability to find his car after a night's drinking because it stinks so much. (I can smell it for blocks, he boasts.) The autobiographical hero, Paul Kemp, is 30, trapped in a dead-end job (Thompson wound up writing for a bowling magazine), and feeling as if his big-time writer dreams, soaked in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, are evaporating as rapidly as the rum in his fist.
In fact, Thompson was only 22 when he wrote The Rum Diary, but his fear of winding up like Moberg was well founded. What saved him was the fantastic conflagration of the 1960s, a fiery wind on which the reptilian wings of his prose style could catch and soar to the cackling heights of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Puerto Rico in 1959 doesn't have bad craziness enough to offer Thompson--just a routine drunken-reporter stomping by local cops and a riot over Kemp's friend's temptress girlfriend, a scantily imagined Smith College alumna who likes to strip nude on beaches and in nightclubs to taunt men.
Thompson's prose style only intermittently takes tentative flight--compare the stomping scenes in this book with his breakthrough, Hell's Angels--but it's interesting to see him so nakedly reveal his sensitive innards, before the celebrated clownish carapace grew in. It's also interesting to see how he improved this full version of the novel from the more raw (and racist) excerpts found in the 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed (available on audiocassette, partly narrated by Thompson). --Tim Appelo
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