I guess I should explain the rating to those of you who would argue that this is Thompson's weakest work, and therefore undeserving of praise...*This novel catches Thompson before he is wrapped in the arms of fame and can get away with anything he wants. In this particular story, he still has to worry about going broke, getting stuck somewhere without hope or help, and potentially watching his dreams smash against the rocks like a heavily polluted ocean wave. Though much of this narrative is fiction, the situation (career, location, finances) of the protagonist come from HST's own experiences in Puerto Rico. Thompson articulates within the pages of this story the mindset of the hopeful lost, the starry-eyed cynics of the world, the trouble-making peace hunters like myself, a section of society whose collective voice he succinctly captures within this quote: "Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that 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."*This novel is frequently hilarious. Never mind Thompson's hands-off approach to people and their petty squabbles and emotional outbursts (his will to survive in relative comfort taking precedence over social niceties, which can make him seem like a stone-cold bastard sometimes), and disregarding his mumbled and grumbled asides about what Nazis poor drivers and Puerto Rican policemen are, the man just has this way of describing people (in groups or individually) that is akin to taking a surgical knife to everything that they stand for. He's a psychoanalyst from hell, and he's damn funny while he's at it: "He was trembling and I offered to drive. He ignored me. 'Man, I'm serious,' he said. 'I've got to get away - my luck is running out.' He has said the same thing before and I think he believed it. He was forever talking about luck, but what he really meant was a very ordered kind of fate. He had a strong sense of it - a belief that large and uncontrollable things were working both for and against him, things that were moving and happening every minute all over the world. The rise of communism worried him because it meant that people were going blind to his sensitivity as a human being. The troubles of the Jews depressed him because it meant that people needed scapegoats and sooner or later he would be one of them. Other things bothered him constantly: the brutality of capitalism because his talents were being exploited, the moronic vulgarity of American tourists because it gave him a bad reputation, the careless stupidity of Puerto Ricans because they were forever making his life dangerous and difficult, and even, for some reason I never understood, the hundreds of stray dogs that he saw in San Juan."*Thompson knows how to inspire your sense of adventure without fooling you about the fact that any journey worth embarking upon will be riddled with bullshit that you must be ready to dodge at every step of the way (this books is mostly about troubles in paradise, in fact). However, when he does find a brief bit of bliss through his travels, he knows how to illustrate his location with simple words, yet in a way that takes you there and makes you lust for it all the same. Here he is describing Vieques Island: "Finally we came over a rise and I saw the Caribbean...My first feeling was a wild desire to drive a stake in the sand and claim the place for myself. The beach was white as salt, and cut off from the world by a ring of steep hills that faced the sea. We were on the edge of a large bay and the water was that clear, turquoise color that you get with a white sand bottom. I had never seen such a place. I wanted to take off all my clothes and never wear them again."I immediately proceeded to run a GIS of Vieques. Thompson's travels gave me a burst of inspiration to get up, prioritize, and to take care of whatever necessary nonsense that I must endure in order to one day see a place such as this for myself. Wanderlust. Sometimes I really like being ordered to get off my bottom by the books that I am reading. Human eyes (mine?) taking in rapturously humbling landscapes after following a knobby path with very little resources? I'll take that trade any day. I'm not sure if this book is technically as good as my experience reading it was, but I respect it regardless. Also, I always hear Thompson's voice when reading his work, which is its own source of amusement. Yep.
This early work by Thompson is cynically compelling for reasons I have a difficult time quantifying. I'm not a fan of alcoholism or unredeeming gloominess, but these are two of the driving forces behind the story. There are hints of Thompson's burgeoning wit and unconventional prose, but what is most fascinating are the varying degrees of "suckfish" employed by a low-grade Puerto Rican newspaper where the main character, Paul Kemp, finds himself employed. Kemp, a journalist in his early 30s, winds up in San Juan, a low spot on the surface of the world where all the dregs have pooled, trying to keep a job and enjoy himself in the process, while coming to grips with the fact that his best days of drinking and philandering are not only behind him, but that they may have been altogether wasted.In Paul Kemp's world, everyone is trying to use everyone else to get ahead, resulting in tenuous friendships that Kemp often finds repulsive, with no alternative but isolation and loneliness, not to mention fewer job opportunities. The majority of non-native people with whom Kemp associates have personalities with their cravenness diametrically opposed to their sense of self loathing. The worse or seedier a character, the less that character cares about how others perceive them--they become dulled to it. As the book progresses Kemp fears he too has regressed in a similar fashion over the course of his journalistic career, imagining himself to have compiled a wealth of useful experiences, only now seeing himself for what he was in the face of blatant mediocrity, arrogance, righteousness, and hedonism.Most characters consider themselves transients, in truth, such as Kemp, who has had several jobs in Europe, or, as in Sala's case, because it's the only way they can maintain any hope of detaching themselves from a despicable San Juan culture to which they have become acclimated. Those that don't are those who have succumbed completely to their environment and base nature, such as the infamously drunken and filthy scandanavian, Moberg, who has contacts in all the dirty circles of the Puerto Rican underbelly.The natives are never represented in great detail, or as much more than an entity seeking to take advantage of the non-natives, and are in some ways just as loathsome as the people trying to wring money from the tropical environment. They are depicted as nearly subhuman, utterly self-interested, and band together against the parasitic newcomers eager to profit from the exploitation of their islands.Thompson's possibly semi-autobiographical work is aptly named. Rum and other forms of alcohol are consumed to the brink of bingeing, often playing a part in or the endcap for several conflicts within the story, as well as filling in all parts between.One never expects a happy ending to The Rum Diary. It's much too bleak and bitter, with Rum and other forms of drink saturating the happy moments and drowning the poor ones, the medium in which the whole story is suspended. Instead, one can only hope for an escape.
What do You think about The Rum Diary (1999)?
Journalist with bad attitude get a job in Puerto Rico working with other ill-tempered men. By the end of the story he has landed a beautiful girl who is simultaneously innocent and whorish. In between there are several rather pointless episodes of newsroom politics, and a stint at the Carnival which is climaxed by the girl dancing naked at a party: exposed to a pointedly non-white audience she clinches the narrators sympathy. Fans of HST may wish to read this for a look at his writing before he hit his stride. Otherwise, it is a bit of a ramble, punctuated by iced rum, hamburgers, swimming, and men saying 'balls'. Thomson wrote this when he was twenty-two; one might hazard that the good doctor may have been a bit too young to have earned enough distance from who he was in order to become what he needed to be. Attitudes that seemed to be at the time of writing the author's own he would later satrize to great effect.It looks like this is going to be a movie. According to today's Wikipedia Johhny Depp will play the lead. Like any mediocre book, the film version may succeed where the source failed.
—Mike
'Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, ,racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue - and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico...'I would guess that in the time that lapsed in this story, a couple tons of rum was consumed. I suppose that explains the title. But serious, these people had to be staggering around drunk all the time. It's amazing they actually got anything done. Oh wait. That's right. They didn't. But considering this story is set in the late 1950's I suppose that would explain their behavior as well."We're all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, and we keep waiting for something to happen. You know - I'm a rebel, I took off - now where's my reward?" "You fool," I said." There is no reward and there never was." Gritty and raw with a tinge of desperation. Paul Kemp in addition to everyone else he's become acquainted with since his arrival on the island of Puerto Rico have only ended up there in hopes of escaping to something better. After quickly realizing that Puerto Rico (at the time) is far from their original vision of paradise, the spiteful and bitter attitudes begin making an appearance. It doesn't take Kemp long to become just as bitter after the realization that a person can work so hard to have a better life, have more money, and to accomplish your dreams and never actually get anything done except wasting time and getting older. "We keep getting drunk and these terrible things keep happening and each one is worse than the last... Hell, it's no fun anymore - our luck's all running out at the same time."The Rum Diary is simply that, a diary. There isn't even that much of a plot, really. It's almost like a pilot episode, a small glimpse of what's to come but unfortunately there isn't any full episode to look forward to. Despite that, I find myself extremely fascinated and I now have an incredibly strong desire to read anything I can get my hands on of Hunter S. Thompson's. The Rum Diary is his second novel which he wrote at the age of 22 is semi-autobiographical because Hunter himself flew down to Puerto Rico as a journalist to write for a newspaper. Despite writing The Rum Diary in the early 1960's, it was never actually published until 1998 because no one was interested and he was constantly rejected. Fortunately, he revisited the idea of publishing it several decades later and he finally succeeding in releasing it to the world.
—Bonnie
You know they're making a movie of The Rum Diary with Johnny Depp? I drove by the newspaper office they created the other day. Too bad I wasn't here when they were filming.It makes me wonder why these kinds of stories live on and on. Why is Thompson's drunken rantings considered important literature? I was especially disgusted by the story of the girl who "...went crazy - totally crazy" and then in the next paragraph is called a "whore" because she was drunk and was being objectified. I'm so tired of women being described as crazy or a whore when truthfully it is the men around them that are the assholes. The men are the ones who don't help her, who leave her in a possible rape/murder situation, and then call her actions "crazy" and whorish. I ask who are the actual crazy whores? I wanted to puke reading this, and it has nothing to do with the amount of rum they were drinking.
—MsDanaE
