Many of Kemp’s indulgent musings about people exhibit a similar power. Thompson shares his talent for keen observation with Kemp, who makes remarks such as, “Sanderson had a firm, practiced grip and I had a feeling that somewhere in his youth he’d been told that a man was measured by the strength of his handshake.” Sentences like this demonstrate impressive authorial control on a line level.

Thompson’s language is shrewd, his observations are sharp, and the characterizations are unquestionably adept. It’s masturbatory and rampantly self-aggrandizing – the whole “Wolf of Wall Street” of journalism if you will. This novel is a barbaric white man fantasy. The line between Kemp and Thompson gets muddled, considering all these things show up in “The Rum Diary.” Pete L’Official wrote for GQ that “Art did not imitate life so much as admire it boozily in the mirror.” Here, Thompson engaged in “early-morning ocean swims, mid-days full of freelance assignments ranging from cock-fighting features to writing travel brochure copy, afternoons and late evenings spent smoking pipes and drinking lustily with other itinerant souls.” The story features fellow narcissist, violent American men working at the Daily News as they rough up the locals, have copious amounts of sex, and drink themselves into early liver failure.Īlthough the novel found publication in 1998, Thompson started the story in 1959, drawing several of the book’s vignettes from his personal experience writing for an English-language newsletter in Puerto Rico.

Thompson’s novel centers around freelance journalist Paul Kemp and his appropriately rum-induced, outrageous, and often reprehensible life working for the San Juan Daily News in the late 1950s. Thompson and his 1998 novel, “The Rum Diary.”ĭepp, a longtime friend of Thompson’s, met Heard on the set of the 2011 movie adaptation of “The Rum Diary.” When they married in the Bahamas in 2015, the pair’s estate manager said that the wedding ceremony included a specific and detailed itinerary of “dinner, dancing, drugs, music.” Thompson’s novel romanticizes an eerily similar unadulterated hedonism just a few islands away in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Still, I don’t blame the actors for this relentlessly uncomfortable overexposure. From bloody vodka bottle fights to Amber Heard’s revenge-feces, the ongoing defamation case between actors Heard and Johnny Depp continues to force-feed me information about the former couple’s lifestyle that makes me wish I was a nun.

The rum diary author