Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is on of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much fait in them and I am no exception -- especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.' - Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary I believe this is labeled as fiction, but since Hunter S. Thompson mostly wrote about his experiences, The Rum Diary is probably about as fictional as say Kerouac's On The Road.

I immediately hailed a cab, telling the man to take me to the middle of town. Old San Juan is an island, connected to the mainland by several causeways. We crossed on the one that comes in from Condado. Dozens of Puerto Ricans stood along the rails, fishing in the shallow lagoon, and off to my right was a huge white shape beneath a neon sign that said Caribé Hilton. This, I knew, was the cornerstone of The Boom. Conrad had come in like Jesus and all the fish had followed. Before Hilton there was nothing; now the sky was the limit. We passed a deserted stadium and soon we were on a boulevard that ran along a cliff. On one side was the dark Atlantic, and, on the other, across the narrow city, were thousands of colored lights on cruise ships tied up at the waterfront. We turned off the boulevard and stopped at a place the driver said was Plaza Colón. The fare was a dollar-thirty and I gave him two bills. The thing that makes it less than fun is that there's some physical abuse (slapping) by the friend of Kemp of the (hopeful) girlfriend, and then she dances naked in a bar one night and is gone missing for a couple days, with no real explanation of what seems to be ominous events we can only guess at. The boys don't endear themselves to the locals with their arrogance. . . I think of Graham Greene's foreign journalist stories such as The Quiet American, or Hem's drunken Pamplona novel, The Sun Also Rises. Sound bleak? I would have liked it more at 25 than I did, but Thompson reveals lots of good writing chops here that makes it engaging.The cook shuffled across the patio with our drinks. "Where were you before this?" Sala asked, lifting his beers off the tray. Yeamon smiled and sat down. "Are you still bitching about Moberg?" He laughed and turned to me. "Robert thinks I mistreated Moberg." Then the stewardess arrived, followed by the co-pilot, who demanded to know what I thought I was doing. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-06-27 09:07:52 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40579906 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

The film opens as the ambitious young hero Paul Kemp (Depp), sporting a white suit, a straw hat and the dark glasses Thompson would wear for a lifetime, applies for a reporting job at the Star. It doesn't appear to be the kind of paper that attracted the ambitious in those days. Lotterman ( Richard Jenkins), the editor, spots him for trouble and immediately asks him how much he drinks. "The high end of social." An unlikable cast of characters who we never learn much about, and not much in the way of an actual plot, make it ineffective as a traditional novel, and it certainly doesn't have that feel.

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He shook his head and pointed at the building, then at me. "Sí, estÿ News." He nodded, then pointed again at the building. "Sí," he said gravely. After ten minutes of half-hearted listening I suspected I was in a den of hustlers. Most of them seemed to be waiting for the seven-thirty flight from Miami, which -- from what I gathered of the conversations -- would be bulging at the seams with architects, strip-men, consultants and Sicilians fleeing Cuba. I saw him fighting outside," I said. "A bunch of Puerto Ricans jumped him right in front of the building." He started to yell just as the girl went by and stopped a few feet up the aisle, looking around for a seat. "Here's one," I said, giving the old man a savage jerk. Before she could turn around the stewardess was on me, pulling at my arm. Allegedly autobiographical, The Rum Diary is an accounting of newspaper journalist Paul Kemp's alcohol induced misadventures in Puerto Rico, circa 1959(ish). Aptly titled with a plethora of boozy contrivances and catastrophes, it is surprisingly coherent and readable. I kept thinking that this is what William S. Burroughs could have been if his drug of choice had been rum instead of hallucinogenic narcotics. Thompson, when in control of his faculties, was one hell of a writer.

Sala shook his head. "That figures -- he's a nut." He nodded. "Probably mouthed off at those union goons. It's some kind of a wildcat strike -- nobody knows what it means." I have a theory that Hunter was inspired by Naipaul when he wrote this novel. He kind of looked upto Naipaul. I've seen a photo of Hunter driving Naipaul around. Naipaul gave the freedom to a lot of writers to be as honest about race as possible. The portrayal of the people of San Juan was very Naipaulian. The drug addled Hunter who went apeshit in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and behaved badly, and over here he expresses his fear for the natives of San Juan, who are not exactly the best hosts.You bastard," Sala muttered. "That girl hasn't been here a day and you're already talking about having whores crawl on you." He nodded wisely. "You'll get the syphilis -- you keep on whoring and stomping around and pretty soon you'll stomp in shit." There is a reason Johnny Depp chose to make a film of this book as his personal tribute to Hunter. Depp needed to find the perfect work that exhibited Hunter in the personality as he truly was to the people that knew him, rather than the crazy, Doonesbury-like caricature that he would become and eventually how people later remembered him. This book (and even the movie to a certain extent) definitely does do that. It is really for the fans that appreciate the zealousness of writing that HST lived for and nothing draws that out better than earliest, rawest novel.

This novel is influenced heavily by Hemingway and in particular, The Sun Also Rises. It is more engaging and entertaining than Hemingway's Parisian non-adventure, and the narrator is more believable and less pitiful. The style hints at the original, and now familiar, voice Thompson would find in his later creative nonfiction. The Rum Diary is an early novel by American writer Hunter S. Thompson. [1] [2] It was written in the early 1960s but was not published until 1998. The manuscript, begun in 1959, was discovered among Thompson's papers by Johnny Depp. [3] The story involves a journalist named Paul Kemp who, in the 1950s, moves from New York to work for a major newspaper, The Daily News, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It is Thompson's second novel, preceded by the still-unpublished Prince Jellyfish.Dale Carnegie was not the only evil American. How many people did Carnegie save? How many lives did Hunter destroy? Nobody has a clue. Nobody knows anything. He gobbled one of his hamburgers. "You'll see," he muttered. "You and Yeamon -- that guy's a freak. He won't last. None of us will last." He slammed his fist on the table. "Sweep -- more beer!" We sat there in silence until two men came out of an office on the other side of the room. One was the tall American I'd seen fighting in the street. The other was short and bald, talking excitedly and gesturing with both hands. The main character of the novel, Paul Kemp, is a journalist in New York City who longs for adventure and excitement. Looking for something new, he moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico and gets a job at a paper there. Paul gets drunk before getting on the plane to Puerto Rico; as he boards, he notices a beautiful woman with whom he wants to talk. He attempts to entice the woman to sit next to him on the plane, but an old man takes the seat Paul had been saving for her. Paul gets into an altercation with the man, and the girl leaves in disgust.