Review: The Rum Diaries, by Hunter S. Thompson

The Rum Diaries

Hunter S. Thompson

Written: 1959 (or so)

Published: 1999

An Alexandrine Couplet Containing Paul Kemp’s Advice For Your Early 20s 

                                         Move to Puerto Rico – wander around drinking

                                         and if you have spare time – existential crisis

There’s a reason that The Rum Diaries took so long to get published, and a reason it’s not Hunter’s most popular book.  For one thing, The Rum Diaries is NOT gonzo journalism.  It’s not exciting, thrilling, or different.  Hunter fans will tell you it’s really slow, laconic, and moody.  He wrote it 10 years before the Kentucky Derby article got him noticed and cemented his style. 

It’s like this painting

At least in pacing and content, The Rum Diaries is the opposite of virtually everything Hunter wrote.  To people who’ve read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, or seen the movie, this is not what they’re expecting.

The Rum Dairies is the story of Hunter Thompson Paul Kemp, a young journalist in Puerto Rico.  He spends most of his time bewildered, sweating, drinking beer or rum, eating in a back-yard-turned-burger-joint, and chasing after a pretty girl.  As the newspaper he works for, and the people he knows, slowly implode, Kemp is more and more disillusioned about the life he’s leading.

Paul was drinking this rum.

He should have been drinking this rum instead.

Unlike Fear And Loathing, there’s very little about drugs in The Rum Diaries – a few references to weed, but nothing pivotal or spectacular.  They drink a lot but in general it doesn’t end in mayhem.

Like it does in this scene from Fear And Loathing

Nor are their references to sports or political dissections, as there are in most of Hunter’s work.  The Rum Dairies is just Hunter writing about Hunter. 

Here’s why you should read it:

Okay, yes, the book is slow.  But it’s brilliant.  It really is.  It great because Hunter wrote this before he went bat-shit insane and turned into a drug addled, gun-toting maniac.  If you like Hunter’s other work, you can see in this how he goes from being essentially passable as a human being to who he became.  And what’s worse: he can, too.  He writes about how he’s torn between living a normal life or a life of bizarre, wanton depravity, and how he doesn’t feel like he’s the one making that choice.  You can see him seeing his own future, being slightly horrified, and being unable to do anything about it.  It’s fascinating as a character study and it informs Hunter’s later works.  It’s got nothing to do with Johnny Depp bumbling around Puerto Rico reprising his role of the Hunter Thompson character from Fear And Loathing.  Johnny played that part brilliantly, but in The Rum Diaries movie he made a fast paced, glib mockery of some of Hunter’s most poignant writing.  Johnny, a real life friend of Hunter, should be ashamed, or at least explain himself.

Overall, this is a great book.  You should give it a try, or give it a try again.  Just go in expecting long, carefully illustrated scenes and lots of cerebral monologues.  The thing is, this is really the exact same thing Hunter does so well throughout his career, and he does it as brilliantly here as anywhere else.  It’s just that later he was doing much more wild things while he was writing. 

Hunter S. Thompson