He sat on my typewriter," I explained, helplessly watching the girl find a seat far up at the front of the plane. I put the book on the 1961 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. I saw the movie last year and it was good. Depp spiffed it up for the 21st century but the book is better; less flashy, more sunk in youthful despair, and the female character is unrecognizable. She is not the one in the movie, she is more pathetic, but most of all she fits right in with the way bad girls were portrayed by male novelists in the early 60s. Hemingway would have approved. Yeamon laughed. "Chenault thought you were the lunatic -- claimed you kept staring at her, then ran amok on the old man -- you were still beating him when she got off the plane." Paul is an arrogant journalist who makes his way from New York to Puerto Rico to work at the only English-language paper on the island. As the paper sits near bankruptcy, he begins to question the reason for coming to the island in the first place. He and his colleagues don’t do much reporting except to each other about drinking and getting laid. Paul falls into a love triangle with a fellow colleague Yeamon and his girlfriend Chenault.

Having worked for newspapers, I enjoyed living vicariously through the main character Paul Kemp "who, in the 1950s, moves from New York to work for a major newspaper, The Daily News, in San Juan, Puerto Rico." (Wikipedia) The struggle to get the story, the weak pay, oddball co-workers and foreign assignments are all dreams and nightmares of the typical journalist, and so it was easy to slide into a comfort-read with The Rum Diary. 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-identifierYeamon invites Paul to visit him and Chenault at their home in the country. Paul arrives early and sees the couple swimming in the nude. He is jealous of Yeamon, envious of how easily he and Chenault get along. He leaves for a while, returning at the scheduled time. Enchanted by Chenault, Paul is annoyed by the way Yeamon seems to treat her in a controlling way. Paul's perspective is too depressing because he finds nothing beautiful - everything is grey and flat. Besides his passive attitude, he's a pretty flat character with no particular ambitions except getting drunk and getting laid. Somewhere through halfway, it became repetitive to read about his monotonous days. Yeamon laughed again. "Sala's the oldest man in San Juan. How old are you, Robert -- about ninety?"

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 have no doubt Hunter Thompson could have been a decent and successful novelist. Instead he created and named his own branch (Gonzo Journalism) of the New Journalism Tom Wolfe and others had pioneered. He probably made the right decision if a lasting literary legacy was his goal, and I think it was. The airport in San Juan is a fine, modern thing, full of bright colors and suntanned people and Latin rhythms blaring from speakers hung on naked girders above the lobby. I walked up a long ramp, carrying my topcoat and my typewriter in one hand, and a small leather bag in the other. The signs led me up another ramp and finally to the coffee shop. As I went in I saw myself in a mirror, looking dirty and disreputable, a pale vagrant with red eyes. I actually really enjoyed reading this. It was well written and engaging. I can see why people might have disliked it, but the things people disliked about it worked for me here for some reason. It's funny because the things I liked about this book didn't seem to appeal to me when I read On The Road right before this. Here I kind of liked the directionless plot line and self centered characters. I think the difference here is it felt like those things played into the overall ruminations in the book about aging and wasted time.

Table of Contents

Yeamon laughed. "You're a fine Christian, Robert. You'll get your reward." He ignored Sala's snort and turned to me. "Did you come in on the morning plane?" He looked at me as if it were incredible that I should have to ask. "Didn't you see him?" he said. "That wild-eyed sonofabitch! Lotterman's scared shitless of him -- couldn't you see it?" So the dude knew how to write, but hey, there are plenty of good writers who manage to write well AND stay fresh and relevant. Thompson isn’t one of them. Lotterman laughed nervously. "You know what I mean, Bob -- let's try to be civil." He turned and waved at Yeamon, who was standing in the middle of the room, examining a rip in the armpit of his coat.

The goofy movie based on this book was a joke. I paid premium for a show in Mumbai to watch the crappy goofy movie. Hunter would have strangled the overrated Johnny Depp fraud for that travesty. The movie even ignored an important character in the book. What a joke the movie was. The cook shuffled across the patio with our drinks. "Where were you before this?" Sala asked, lifting his beers off the tray.The Rum Diary opens very promising, with snippets of office politics, masculine desperation and one’s search to find the meaning of life in a foreign land. For a book with nothing particularly interesting going on, Hunter S. Thompson got a way to keep me on the edge of my seat. The man’s got way with words. The only problem I encountered was, through the eyes of protagonist Paul Kemp, Thompson didn’t portray either the Puerto Ricans or the Americans in a very kind way. The expatriates were depicted as drunkards were irresponsible and unprofessional, while the natives were stereotyped as people who started fights with foreigners and cannot be trusted. Nothing is beautiful in Kemp’s eyes, except maybe “that little muff of brown hair standing out like a beacon against the white flesh of (Chenault’s) belly and thighs”. Paul and Sala go to visit Yeamon a few days later to see how he is doing without a steady income. Sala and Paul witness Yeamon hitting Chenault before the three of them take off to have a few drinks at a local bar that Yeamon insists will give him credit. However, once they have shared in more than ten dollars of rum, the manager of the bar insists they pay their bill. Yeamon refuses and will not allow Sala or Paul to pay either. The three of them leave only to be chased down by the bar's customers and local police. A brawl erupts and the three men are beaten severely before being taken into police custody. At court later that night, the cops lie and say that Paul, Sala, and Yeamon started the brawl. Sanderson shows up and drops a few influential names that persuade the judge to set bail for all three.

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. 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." Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves. You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can't get a grip. I had this feeling, and when I got to the hotel I went straight to bed.

You're the same way", he said. "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." He looked up. "You know- I'm a rebel, I took off- now where's my reward?" Finally I gave up. There seemed to be no restaurants in the Old City. The only thing I saw was called the New York Diner, and it was closed. In desperation, I hailed a cab and told him to take me to the Daily News. It isn't very good. The writing style isn't compelling, there is no plot and no hint of the future nor of the direction of the book. This is the kind of novel that you either adore or feel indifferent about. It's definitely NOT my cup of tea. There's no deep characterization nor natural growth of the bond between characters.