Name: The rum diary
ISBN: 9783453503830

Hunter S. Thompson

Roman

The rum diary

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Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles-a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other-that kept me going.

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.

[he] was familiar too, but not quite as close-more like a memory of somebody I'd known in some other place and then lost track of.

[...] he reminded me vaguely of myself at that age—not exactly the way I was, but the way I might have seen myself if I'd stopped to think about it. Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, [...]

It made me feel old and slightly nervous that I had done so little in so long a time.

There was no reason to feel pressure, but I felt it anyway-the pressure of hot air and passing time, an idle tension that builds up in places where men sweat twenty-four hours a day.

"My agent wants some casino shots. They're hard to come by."

"Illegal," he said. "When I first got here they caught me shooting at the Caribé-I had to go see Commissioner Rogan. He laughed.

"He asked me how I'd feel if I took a shot of some poor bastard at the roulette wheel and it happened to appear in his hometown paper just about the time he applied for a bank loan?" He laughed again. "I told him I couldn't care less. I'm a photographer, not a goddamn social worker."

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories-not of things I had done but of things I failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.

I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue-and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca.

Everybody I met acted as if they had just come back from a crucial screen test.

He was forever talking about luck, but what he really meant was a very ordered kind of fate. He had a strong sense of it—a belief that large and uncontrollable things were working both for and against him

Not much of what he said was original. What made him unique was the fact that he had no sense of detachment at all.

This reminded me of my experience in Portugal. Although I'm Brazilian and native (Brazilian) portuguese speaker, I couldn't understand a word of what most people would say to me in Portugal.

Although he spoke perfect English there was still a language barrier, and I sensed immediately that no real meaning would ever pass between us.

I had no social ambitions in those days. I had a license to wander. I was a working journalist and I had easy access to anything I needed

I had a feeling that I was being cut out of things and that he was the reason for it. This wouldn't have bothered me at all had I felt it was my own doing.

Whatever he might have denied me was unimportant; it was the fact that he could deny me anything at all, even what I didn't want.

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al's, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn't stand the idea of going back to the apartment.

From the very beginning I had felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is pretty cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

"Are you here for good?" I said, looking up at Chenault.

She smiled. "I don't know. [...] I just want to be happy. I'm happy with Fritz-so I'm here."

She laughed. "It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now."

Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception-especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong.

I have never seen a man so bent on self-destruction-not only self, but destruction of everything he could get his hands on.

Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary—a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book—is Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean. Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule, and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing books.

A Novel

The Rum Diary

The story flow very smoothly and honestly. The book is more about the atmosphere and experience. So while I felt like the same person after reading it, I know that somewhere deep inside the book had fused itself into me. And so what happened in the book felt like something that happened in my own distant past.

Viet-Hung Nguyen

'The Rum Diary', the story of a drunken young journalist, is Thompson's only work of fiction.|PB

M. Marques

The title says it all.
This was personally more enjoyable than “on the road”.

Clara Moore

This book was weirdly ordinary and in my opinion has not aged very well. I liked that his writing was simple and honest but there was little description. He hints at things that would make good stories or plot points but then never elaborates. It was hard for me to get past the white ex-pat talking poorly about the natives and his lack of respect towards women. Again - didn't age well. I can see though how at the time it was written it would've been well received.

Summer Stanley

Definitely captivating from the start. I suppose I am not the biggest fan of this style of writing, almost stream of consciousness memoir. With that being said, I kept waiting for "something" to happen and although there were climactic moments, there was no one moment that defined the characters and their actions. Overall enjoyable, just not my favorite.

The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.

Jordan

Lovro Oreskovic

Lucas Morales Sousa

Pierre

Iestyn Lloyd

Megan Murray 

Laura Mauler

Jayme Cochrane

Dane Jensen

Michael Cowell

Martin Weitzel

Juan Felipe

nabnerd

Katie Snell 

Martin Weiss

Rikki Doppler

Kim 

Made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary—a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book—is Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent lust in the Caribbean. Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, this dazzling comedic romp provides a fictional excursion as riveting and outrageous as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing books.

The rum diary Roman