Kemp, a young globetrotting journalist, rum drinker and alter ego of the author, left Greenwich Village, in the 1950s, for Puerto Rico, where he got a job as a journalist in the San Juan Daily News. A diverse fauna of characters works there: misanthropes, disappointed, unsuccessful, ambitious, ready to remake the world, all of them outcasts in search of a better existence in the tropics. But the paradisiacal triad of rum, sex and sun becomes prolonged drunkenness, endless fights and wild parties of wild sexuality. And as he battles the laughable freedom from boredom, Kemp attends the slow agony of an island eaten away by money, America's ambitions, and the hypocritical commitment of journalists. This first novel by the creator of the so-called "gonzo journalism", which shone in all its splendor in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is the morbid chronicle of a disappointment. "Hilarious, absolutely real and tragic ... How fascinating and interesting it would have been if, in 1959, at the age of 22, Hunter S. Thompson had fled for example to Puerto Rico, had drank his weight in rum daily, had fucked all night and would have sat under an umbrella to write a novel. Well, it did. The novel remained buried and forgotten in the damp basement of her fortified Colorado ranch, until a friend unearthed it. It is called The Rum Diary and the wait has been worth it ... It is a real gem, a nimble and well-built novel that leaves the reader restless and smiling »(Scotland on Sunday). "Wild, sharp, visceral, cynical and sarcastic ... A very funny book that will make your life seem extremely boring by comparison" (Scene)