Sunday, April 24, 2011

Hunter S. Thompson - The Rum Diary: A Novel (1998)


"When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the peopleAmostly drunks and layaboutsAwho gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. As he always has done, Thompson lays on the drinking and general hell-raising very thick (the amount of rum consumed would dry up a distillery) and indulges flashes of bad temper toward commercialism while always showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a buck. His style is less hallucinatory and exclamatory than it later became, but the groundwork is there. The best parts of the book are its occasional, almost grudging, acknowledgments of natural beauty; the people in it are no more than props. Author tour." 



7 comments:

Markob said...

Ovo (i Hell's Angels) je objavljeno i kod nas.

Δημήτρης said...

greetings mate i love your blog!!is there any chance of posting any boyd rice book??can't find them nowhere(especially No)..cheers from Greece!!

son of man said...

Sorry Dimitris, but there are no PDF books of Boyd Rice. But if you like that style you can try with reading this, "Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left-Hand Path Sex Magic" by Boyd's close friend Nikolas Schreck. Big hello to my second fatherland, Greece !

@Markob - iskreno prvi put sad čujem da su to preveli kod nas, ali mi drago, a jebiga kad jednom godišnje odem do knjižare, ko me jebe, uglavnom kupujem oba ako nađem, gde ima se pazari ako ima još primeraka uopšte, jel znaš ?

Δημήτρης said...

will definately check it-thanks!!

MarkoB said...

ne secam se,kupih davno...vidi ako jos traje Uskrsnji sajam knjiga u holu Doma sindikata, tamo je vazda bilo jeftinih knjiga.

Dnevnik ruma,Algoritam,2006
(http://www.algoritam.co.rs/strane/tomson_dr.html)

Andjeli pakla,Zograf,2006
(mislim da ces tesko naci knjigu sa vise stamparskih gresaka)

MarkoB said...

zabovih...pogledaj i

http://www.mediterran.rs/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=196%3Aerving-gofman-azili&catid=48&Itemid=64

i

http://www.mediterran.rs/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=110:erving-gofman-stigma&catid=48&Itemid=64

vidim da volis i nesto teorijsko da procitas, pa rek'o...

колапс said...

издата је овде, али је нисам видео одавно по књижарама...

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