Product Description
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.
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Amazon.com 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 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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 For diehard HST fans only. Maybe. ( oksol )
I read "The Rum Diary" because I am a diehard fan of HST.
"Rum Diary" has no plot; HST had the setting but he couldn't figure out a story line. "The Rum Diary" is simply that, a diary. The back cover of the soft cover edition says that "The Rum Diary," begun in 1959 "by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, is a brilliant, 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 best-selling 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and 'Hell's Angels.'"
Nothing could be farther from the truth. "Fear and Loathing" is an outrageous, drug-filled, hilarious, biographical sketch of HST's various assignments for "Rolling Stone" and other publications. "Hell's Angels" was also biographical, but written for an entirely different audience, a more newsworthy account of a new American phenomenon in the 1950s.
"The Rum Diary" is simply a diary of a few months in HST's life on Puerto Rico, where he got his real start in life. This is his coming-of-age story and established the course for his future. "The Rum Diary" chronicles his raging hormones and his short-lived relationship with a beautiful woman on the island.
After reading a biography of Ernest Hemingway's last years (from 1941 to his suicide in 1961) I am convinced that HST wanted to re-live Hemingway's life. The parallels are eerie: Hemingway's "home" was Cuba; HST left for Puerto Rico to write "The Rum Diary." Hemingway struggled to write a book when he first arrived in Cuba, one that was never published while he was alive. Hemingway was known for his participation in wars around the world. HST was "Rolling Stone's" foreign correspondent during the Vietnam War. HST was in Vietnam the day it fell, and used his wits to get out of the country alive. And, finally, of course, the last eerie parallel: HST committed suicide - he was 67 years old; Hemingway was 61 when he committed suicide. Shortly before his suicide, HST traveled to Hemingway's home in Idaho trying to get a better feeling why Hemingway committed suicide.
If you want to complete your HST library, this will be the last book to read. Other than seeing HST's early writing style, this book has little to offer.
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 Thompson Can't BE Beat! ( kailuatann )
If there is one thing you can count on with HT..it is that he us ALWAYS off the wall...and to say that he is entertaining would be an understatement!
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 GONZO
Great writing great story! It's a must read for Hunter S. Thompson fans. Also the new movie GONZO is a very good doc on the guy
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Great first book ( dianna_dilworth )
Very enjoyable book on Hunter S Thompson's time in Puerto Rico. And interesting time capsule for the island, as it was undergoing a development boom, about to put it on the map as a tourist destination. Fun read!
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Unexpectedly Satisfying
The main character, Paul Kemp, is a journalist gets a job at a failing newspaper in San Juan Puerto Rico. He and his co-workers are mostly dysfunctional, abusive alcoholics, but most have some interesting charm or wit about them, and this is presented in a Thompson's typically entertaining style. In between the fights and drunken adventures is some deep commentary about getting older and the prospect of wasting one's life.
Even though Thompson was only 22 when this was written, this is a mature, thoughtful novel -- not at all what I expected.
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