Hunter S. Thompson

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

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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

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