The Rum Diary - The Long Lost Novel
(Hunter S. Thompson)
This is the "lost novel" by Hunter S. Thompson, a book that he started writing in 1959 to make a quick buck. He struggled all through the sixties to get this thing rewritten and published, but because of its quality and Thompson''s legendary shakedowns with agents, publishers, and contracts, it died on the vine - until a few years ago. This quasi-fictional account of a New York reporter drifting into a job at the San Juan Daily News is somewhat based on Thompson''s experience on the Carribean island in the late 1950. Trying to put Puerto Rico on the literary map like Hemingway did for Paris, he spells out a story of corruption, boredom, and alcohol in a more simple San Juan, before the big booms of the travel booms and technology of the sixties. Paul Kemp, the fictional narrator, describes the coworkers, women, natives, and insane government, riddled with syndicates and kickbacks. The writing here isn''t like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it''s more of the Orwell/Mailer/Miller genre, and does a good job of painting memorable scenes of the insanity, camaraderie, poverty, and drunkenness on top of the tropical backdrop. It''s not bad stuff, and I wonder if it recently went through heavy rewrites, or if there just wasn''t a market for it back in the sixties. Either way, it''s a light, fast read at just over 200 pages, and made me wonder if Thompson''s other unpublished works would be as satisfying in a trade hardcover.
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