What Is The Rum Diary By Hunter S. Thompson About?

I read this a long time ago but it still lingers in my memory. It is an early work by the writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and follows a journalist, Kemp, who travels to Puerto Rico to cover the expansion of an American giant. The story doesn’t follow a traditional plot and rather focuses on the atmosphere of a tropical setting in full summer. The writer chooses to present Kemp not as a hero but rather as an ordinary guy searching for his place in the world while trying to find himself through his writing. Surrounded by another cast of lost souls, Kemp is unable to escape the clutches of the slimy Sanderson. The book has a very slow development, which gives it the feeling of a very humid afternoon when time seems to stand still. A number of scenes stick in my mind but the last one was particularly effective as Kemp sits on the beach staring out to sea wondering if he will ever manage to get his life together. A moving scene that evoked a strong feeling of recognition in me.

'Oh this wonderful novel, The Rum Diary, by the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. This is a good, messey book about one very messy man. Paul Kemp is an idealistic but immature man who tries to run from his problems by moving to the island of Puerto Rico. But, the island in the end will consume him. A wonderful and very detailed description of the island of Puerto Rico and its people, affected by Kemp’s influence, in a state of near-intoxication, 24/7. In this book Thompson’s writing is less manic than in his later works but you can see the beginnings of the type of journalism that he would later call Gonzo-journalism, i.e. mix of fact and fiction from his own life.

I love how the relationships in this novel work out to be a mirror to the protagonist’s wonderful chaos. First of all, there is Chenault. She is a stunning, wild-haired and -livered woman, practically a symbol more than a developed character. In her, Kemp sees everything he desires but cannot have. Then there is Sala, Kemp’s equally hapless colleague. I read Sala as a kind of harbinger of the ruining that Kemp is capable of bringing upon himself. It’s a wonderful love letter to self-destruction, almost hopeful in the end that all that chaos was worth the stories he managed to spin. (It’s not Thompson’s best work by any means — it often reads as if we’re reading his notebooks and watching him work out his literary voice, but there’s something compelling about that amateur quality.)

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson is one of the wildest novels I have ever read. It is as if you can step into this sun-drenched, booze-fueled fever dream. This was written by Thompson in the 1960s but the book wasn’t published until later. It follows the journey of Paul Kemp, a talented but slightly burned out journalist, who takes a job with the crumbling San Juan tourist paper where he soon finds himself drawn into the scoiral and lawless world of a few rather dodgy and dissipated ex-patriates where they struggle to face up to the reality of their own ruined lives in their go-along-to-get-along wine-soaked world of zombies in a tainted world of deterioration. Through his splendidly acerbic observations, sharp as a serpent’s tooth, and all the more mordant because occasionally bizarre and poetic, we are given a depth and vibrant sensation of the desperately decaying city of San Juan and its hopeless, broken Existentialism of a declining third-world city. I finish this superbly observable novel feeling overwhelmingly in need of a very long hot shower and a stiff (very stiff) drink.

The novel is often described as having much of Thompson’s life in it, as the author did live in Puerto Rico briefly. The novel has a rough, unfinished quality to it. There is a scene in which Kemp and his friends go for a destruction derby style of driving after having been drinking all day. This scene is both hilarious and tragic. I think it would be of particular interest to readers of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, as the two novels share a somewhat similar style and preoccupation with searching for meaning in a post-boom American landscape, though the Rum Diary deals less with issues of drug use and more with the effects of disillusionment in a person’s life over time. This is a very “alive” novel and that’s part of its interest.