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Summary
Summary
The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel, and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would "in a twisted way...do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris." In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the "ill-tempered wandering rabble" on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. "I shared a dark suspicion," Kemp says, "that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other -- that kept me going." The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. "It was a gold rush," says the author. "There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit." Puerto Rico was an unspoiled tropical paradise in those years -- before Castro, before JFK, before civil rights & moonwalks & flower power & Vietnam & protests & even before drugs -- but the San Juan Daily News was a vortex & a snakepit of all the corrupt new schemes & plots & greedmongers who swarmed in. Paul Kemp, The Rum Diary's narrator, speaks for the unfocused angst of those times: "In a sense I was one of them -- more competent than some and more stable than others -- and in the years that carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys, I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way."
Summary
Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary --a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book--is Hunter S. Thompson's brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean.
Begun in 1959 by a 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. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson's Fear and Loathing books.
Author Notes
Hunter S. Thompson was born on July 18, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. At the age of sixteen he was inducted into the Athenaeum Literary Association and wrote for the Athenaeum Journal.
During his two years in the US Air Force, Thompson wrote a sports column for The Common Courier. After he was discharged, he moved to New York to work as a copy boy at Time Magazine and later moved to San Juan to write for a Puerto Rican bowling magazine. He also reported to the National Observer from South America.
Upon his return to the US, Thompson wrote Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, which became a national bestseller and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was originally published in Rolling Stone magazine. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Esquire. Both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp portrayed Hunter in feature film movies based on his books, Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, respectively.
Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide on February 20, 2005 at his home in Colorado.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Hunter S. Thompson was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. His books include Hell's Angels , Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone , Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 , The Rum Diary , and Better than Sex . He died in February 2005.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the peopleÄmostly drunks and layaboutsÄwho gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. As he always has done, Thompson lays on the drinking and general hell-raising very thick (the amount of rum consumed would dry up a distillery) and indulges flashes of bad temper toward commercialism while always showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a buck. His style is less hallucinatory and exclamatory than it later became, but the groundwork is there. The best parts of the book are its occasional, almost grudging, acknowledgments of natural beauty; the people in it are no more than props. Author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The original Gonzo journalist (Proud Highway, 1997, etc.) spent a sober afternoon going through his archives to find this unpublished novel (his only fiction), written at the start of his career. He might as well have let it rest in peace. Thompson's great achievement as a writer, of course, has been the role he played in the development of the ``new journalism''of the1960s. Making the most of a vicious wit, sharp tongue, and riotous imagination, Thompson infused his reportingmost famously, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegaswith a vigor and depth of personality usually associated more with novels than with newspapers, helping thereby to raise the literary status of nonfiction. It's hardly a surprise, then, to learn that Thompson has had a novel locked away in a desk drawer all these years. What's surprising is how much less compelling it is than his journalism. Paul Kemp, the narrator, is a young New Yorker starting out as a newspaperman in Puerto Rico in the late 50s. Soon after arriving in San Juan, he manages to land a job at the Daily News, an English- language rag whose staffan assortment of has-beens, mad geniuses, drunks, and spongerswould seem more at home in the Foreign Legion. The legendary Thompson manner (``Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves'') is flourished here, all right, and the typical Thompson high jinks of public misbehavior and private lewdness make up most of the story, which is more portrait than tale. There are fights in bars and trouble with cops. There are crazy chicks from Smith who like to undress in public. There are writers who, though broke, always manage to get an assignment just before their landlady evicts them. And through the whole of it, there is one febrile intelligence noticing and reporting on everything that takes place both inside and outside of himself. A fun drive that takes you nowhere much. Thompson fans wont be disappointed, of course, but most everyone else would be better off going to Henry Miller for that sort of thing.
Booklist Review
Thompson has kept the waters of U.S. letters boiling with his hopped-up gonzo nonfiction, creating a raging, grubbily poetic, and galvanic persona who reacts to all that is rotten in the world with a compelling mix of self-aggrandizement and self-destruction. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), has been made into a film; most of his letters have been published (The Proud Highway [1997]); and now his only work of fiction, a dark novel predating his journalistic books, is finally seeing the light of day. Thompson was right to keep it under wraps. It isn't as potent or as well-targeted as his nonfiction, but it does reveal the early stage of his particular form of myth-making and the emergence of his distinctive voice. A bitter little tale about angry men and one angry woman, it stars Paul Kemp, a hard-drinking, peripatetic cold war^-era journalist who boosts himself out of New York for a stint in the sun in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Kemp is hoping for a tropical respite but instead wanders into a bad situation. The Puerto Ricans, fed up with greedy, prejudiced Americans, have been beating up the reporters for the News, Kemp's employer. Kemp, rarely sober, soon finds himself on the receiving end, along with his comrades, a moody photographer named Sala, and Yeamon, a guy who attracts trouble like his pretty little girlfriend attracts men. Every hyped-up scene is saturated in rum and sweat, and the action has a grindingly repetitive pattern, like a badly mounted ceiling fan on high, but Kemp's wrath and exasperation exert a near-hallucinatory fascination, and the acidity of Thompson's worldview is a fine antidote for complacency. An excerpt has been recently published in the New Yorker. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Thompson has long been known as the father of gonzo journalism. His essayspart fact, part fictionon politics, media, and the culture of his America can be as beautiful as a poem or as brutal as today's news. The Rum Diary, begun in 1959, is his first novel. It is also an autobiography, for he is evident in the character of Paul Kemp, a young writer new to Puerto Rico: "a seeker, a mover, a malcontent." Kemp has accepted a job on the Daily News, the English-language paper in San Juan. He soon meets the paper's photographer, Sala, and another young reporter, Yeaman. Together, they embark on a strange odysseya drunken, carousing journey through the Caribbean of the 1950s. Amazingly beautiful passages, well read by Campbell Scott, run dead end into dark ugly reminders of the violence, fear, and loathing that populate Thompson's later work (e.g., Songs of the Doomed, Audio Reviews, LJ 6/15/91) . Recommended for all libraries with an interest in politics, journalism, and American literature.Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.