Another, perhaps Yeamon - is Thompson as he would like to see himself - the wild, aimless wanderer who knows he'll never starve as long as he has a typewriter or a pen and paper.

Oh girlfriends, is this stuff dated! It’s so dated it stinks. I can’t imagine who would like to read it, really. Old boys, priests of the cult of St. Hemingway, who feel nostalgic about the good times when women, coloreds, and queers knew their place? Honestly, I can’t see the appeal. The Rum Diary is a book dripping with legend and lore: that Thompson wrote it in 1960 when he was a Hemingway worshipper but couldn't get it published, that Johnny Depp found the manuscript among Thompson's papers and got it published in 1998, that Depp finally got it made as a movie in 2011, six years after Thompson's death. When it comes to Hunter S Thompson, the truth is deeply buried in his outrageous persona.A Southerner first, he was in thrall to Faulkner, and he thought that William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951) was "without a doubt the finest book written in this country since the Second World War." He kept the first line of Joseph Conrad's preface to his 1897 novella, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," as a personal mantra while writing in Puerto Rico: "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line." Thompson, to his credit, never lost this deep, abiding respect for the seriousness of his chosen craft no matter how many peyote buttons he would eat or vehicle floor mats he soaked in raw ether. (It's the fumes that get you.) Even so, The Rum Diary reads, from where we sit at the far side of his singular journalistic career, like someone fighting with the—writerly! not hallucinatory!—voices in his head, all sound and fury. He laughed. "Oh no -- tomorrow. I wouldn't put you to work tonight." He laughed again. "No, I want you boys to eat" He smiled down at Sala. "I suppose Bob's going to show you the town, eh?"

I groaned, feeling the web of sin and circumstance close down on the table. Sala eyed me suspiciously.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. 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.

There is the dim purpose, in the film and I guess in the novel, that Kemp is fighting corruption in the form of American money being used to defraud Puerto Ricans. This is no doubt his purpose, but his mind is so muddled and his days so haphazard that he often seems to be drifting toward a vaguely seen destination.Yeamon nodded. "Robert needs a woman," he said gently. "His penis is pressing on his brain and he can't think." He started to yell just as the girl went by and stopped a few feet up the aisle, looking around for a seat. "Here's one," I said, giving the old man a savage jerk. Before she could turn around the stewardess was on me, pulling at my arm. There is a reason Johnny Depp chose to make a film of this book as his personal tribute to Hunter. Depp needed to find the perfect work that exhibited Hunter in the personality as he truly was to the people that knew him, rather than the crazy, Doonesbury-like caricature that he would become and eventually how people later remembered him. This book (and even the movie to a certain extent) definitely does do that. It is really for the fans that appreciate the zealousness of writing that HST lived for and nothing draws that out better than earliest, rawest novel. 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. An unlikable cast of characters who we never learn much about, and not much in the way of an actual plot, make it ineffective as a traditional novel, and it certainly doesn't have that feel.