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
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780684856476
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
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Book Reviews of The Rum Diary : A Novel
Book Review: Lost Gonzo classic
Summary: 4 Stars
This was reportedly one of the first books written by Hunter S Thompson, when he was in his twenties, but remained unreleased for decades. I don't know why, because this is an outstanding and (at the time it was written) highly original book.
What is remarkable is that even at this early stage, Thompson's "Gonzo" approach is already well developed. Drawing on his own experiences in Puerto Rico, Thompson blends fact, embellishment, and fiction into a unique whole. In true Gonzo fashion, the narrative is less important than describing the people, the places, and the times that Thompson has witnessed. However, probably because it is one of his first books, 'The Rum Diary' is a more straightforward and coherent story than later works such as 'Fear And Loathing...'.
Thompson's description of the bums, drunks, psychos, crooks, and dealers who inhabited Puerto Rico in the Fifties is at different times funny, surreal and tragic. Some moments border on slapstick comedy, while others (such as when the hacks all gather at Al's to get drunk and reflect) are poignant and despairing. The Gonzo style really brings out the spirit of the times, chronicling those restless visionaries who scramble for a foothold in the developing market, and the frustrated have-nots who drink themselves into a stupor night after night.
It's often the case that so-called "lost classics" are inferior novels that don't live up to the hype, but 'The Rum Diary' really is deserving of that status. While it probably pales in comparison to Thompson's more innovative works, the book is still a good read. Thompson acolytes will definitely want to see where it all started for their hero, while the book's relative accessibility also makes it suitable for more casual fans who would be put off by Thompson's other works. A true hidden gem, and I highly recommend it.
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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