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: A good diversion, but not a life shaping experience.
Summary: 3 Stars
HST was obviously young and still discovering his voice in this, one of few fictions by the author. For a Gonzo nerd such as myself it was good to see where he was as a young author. For the casual reader, however, this book will be a disappointment. A haphazard narrative filled with inconsistent characters, some of them half-formed yet expected by the author to be major contributors to the storyline, the Rum Diary isn't so much a rollercoaster ride as an awkward memoir of a time HST wished he'd had by a character all too obviously based on the author himself. The characters all spout now classic HST lines and, though penned before any of his major works, simple lines like "the fat is in the fire" become cliched by the end of the work even if this is your first HST read.
Read it, sure, but read other works by the author first... if for no other reason than to see how far the King of Gonzo grew in his writing style by the time he penned Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It's light fare and leaves you with a definite feeling of "huh?"
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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