Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #530332 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"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 F. Scott- Fitzgerald and Ernest 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 --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com

Synopsis
The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.

Customer Reviews

Pre-Gonzo Well Worth The Wait
Obviously the fact that Hunter S. Thompson spent a great deal of his younger years in Puerto Rico, helps set the atmosphere of this eagerly awaited Hunter pre-cursor to his 'Gonzo Journalism' works of fiction.

The story is told through the eyes of Paul Kemp a journalist, who uninterested with writing in his native America acquires a job on Puerto Rico writing for the struggling San Juan Daily News and it's belligerent Editor Lotterman.

He makes many acquaintances, who all seem to be seasoned drinkers, the most significant being the mesmeric beauty Chenault, whom Paul falls for immediately and her rum hardened love Yeamon.

Thereon the three of them they manage to push both the boundaries of friendship and law to their limits, in what seems to be the pursuit of hedonism over journalism.

The depiction of Puerto Rico in the late fifties is comprehensive enough to make you feel as though you are there, the damp heat, the stench of the ground floor apartment Paul shares with Sala, the staff photographer at the Daily News and the uncomfortable surroundings of the offices are portrayed with consummate account.

Although showing nowhere as near as much licentiousness as the characters from Hunter's fear and loathing guise, the excesses portrayed in this book are typically Thompson, (as the title suggests Rum being the principal tonic) and more than once the dialogue reflects this, leaving the reader grasping for the bottle hoping to shed some light on the discourse.

Through lunacy and incoherence Hunter S. Thompson has a writing style that makes it hard for you to lose track of the story and even harder for you to put down.

A quality book from Thompson before the madness set in.

If you like HST you'll like this!!!
While not as weird as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and certainly not as insightful as Fear and Loathing in America, The Rum Diary drags you into the scene of San Juan in the late fifties and unfolds a strange and compelling tale of sex, violence and rum, lot's of it. Darkly comical- the scene of Hunter trying to save a seat for a young lady on a plane, and ending up assaulting an old man will have you chuckling. Whilst at the same time being comically dark- Thompson being beaten by the locals for an unpaid bar bill. The Rum Diary will have you thinking that you're lying on a beach in Puerto Rico. A great book for the summer and a good introduction to the King of Gonzo.