Notes on Hunter S. Thompson's *The Rum Diary*

Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary is a manic read.

The first few pages italicized pages are well-crafted, almost painterly in their evocation of a particular time and place, in this case 1950’s Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, this promising start is not sustained (and this from an unabashed Thompson fan). Instead, we are quickly dropped into Thompson’s fevered world of cartoonish violence, mayhem, and paranoia.

Ostensibly, the novel is about Paul Kemp, a transplanted New York journalist who lands at a Puerto Rican newspaper on the verge of collapse. Kemp has various run-ins with the staff, the police, the citizenry. And he does it all with a drink in his hand practically the whole time. Pair this with an uneven portrait of a love triangle between himself, his co-worker, and a woman named Chenault and you have the entire novel (at 200 pages, really a novella). The turning point comes late in the story and I won’t spoil it here, but it is, in a word, disturbing how Thompson describes it and deals with it from a narrative perspective.

Stylistically, the novel is unbalanced. Some sections – those dealing with the newspaper and its erratic drunken staff – are staccato. Short, jabbing sentences put the reader on edge just as much as the story itself. Other portions take a more leisurely pace. The effect is that Kemp, our narrator, comes across as somewhat schizophrenic. Maybe this was intentional, but I cannot think that it is.

There are passages of tremendous insight, flashes of absolute narrative brilliance. But they are few and far between in a scattered, eclectic storyline.

Giovanni Ribisi, Johnny Depp, and
Michael Rispoli in The Rum Diary

I read The Rum Diary in anticipation of the upcoming film. After reading it, I’m not certain if I will even see it (at least, not in the theaters). I can tell from the trailer that they are taking quite a few liberties with the plot, embroiling Paul Kemp in what appears to be a real estate swindle that, I’m guessing, he will be made to combat in the newspaper.

The funny thing about The Rum Diary is that I can’t recommend it, but I’m glad that I read it.

David Roberts - *Finding Everett Ruess*

I went into David Roberts’ non-fiction study Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer with high expectations. I’m not even sure I can say why. Up to this point I’ve read two other Roberts books: A Newer World, the history of Kit Carson and John Charles Fremont’s explorations of the Sierra Nevada, and In Search of the Old Ones , his account of his personal journeys in the southwest among ancient pueblo sites. Neither impressed me much -- A Newer World is surpassed in scope by Tom Dunlay’s encyclopedic study of the wilderness scout, Kit Carson and the Indians, and in narrative and journalistic ability by Hampton Sides’ excellent and much recommended Blood and Thunder. In Search of the Old Ones has nothing on Craig Child’s compelling personal odyssey, House of Rain.

So why did I start this book with such eagerness? Was it Outside magazine’s rave up of it? Or the endorsement by Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer that got me going? I suppose, really, it was the notion of Everett Ruess himself: a young wilderness aesthete who, in the early 1930’s at the age of sixteen, set off on a series of journeys into the great southwest, his only companions a burro or two and a stray dog. By the age of 20, he had disappeared into the canyon country, never to be heard from again, his remains lost to time. He left behind a legacy of words in his personal journals and correspondence that has garnered him a cult following around the globe. A poet, a painter, a woodcut maker, an ancient pueblo enthusiast, Ruess is a fascinating study. His legend obviously resonated with Krakauer who found him to be a prototype for his cockeyed protagonist and tragic self-knowledge-seeker Christopher McCandless (from Into the Wild -- Ruess merited a few pages in that bestseller).

That, I believe, is it: the stories of a people committed to exploring the self in nature’s hardest climes has always intrigued me. That willingness and ability to just walk away from everything. Add in the mystery of the disappearance and, well, you have the makings of a great true story. Finding Everett Ruess is more than just a biography, though. It is also a narrative of Roberts’ personal quest to find out what ultimately happened to Ruess and the mistakes that he – Roberts – made along the way.

Everett Ruess

The first part is a well-balanced look at Ruess’ life, overall. Roberts devotes essentially equal time to Ruess’ formative years. Of particular interest is Ruess’ relationship with his parents, who essentially encouraged and cultivated his aesthetic sense and wonder in art and nature. A small wonder, then, when the sixteen year old Ruess departs on the first of his travels – a nine month journey in Yosemite. Ruess’ relationship with his parents will be a recurring juxtaposition point for Roberts. It is interesting to watch Ruess as while contemplating how much financial support he enjoyed from his parents. From here, Roberts chronicles Ruess’ various journeys in and around the southwest while peppering his narrative with quotes from Ruess’ own journals and correspondence. The recursive nature of this trips, the repetitive methods with which Roberts describes it, are draining and I found myself eager to move on to the next section, the next chapter.

Some exploits are truly entertaining, memorable, and easily pictured. Ruess’ misadventures during the Sierra trip, for example, his disenchantment with the seeming monotony of this exploit, come through in the letters and journal entries Roberts provides. In many ways, this trip, while dissatisfying for Ruess, is more entertaining. Roberts spends a bit of time relating Ruess’ ongoing problems with his burros and his horses – nearly drowning them in one instance. Ruess’ short stay in San Francisco also provides certain illumination on his character. And I did find myself turning the pages more rapidly and with more commitment to the story the closer Roberts got to Ruess’ ultimate demise at age 20 in Davis Gulch (no secret given the cover and bookflap).

 Seemingly the end? Of Everett Ruess, yes. Of Roberts’ narrative, no.

Over the last nearly two hundred pages, Roberts devotes his time to describing both contemporary efforts to find Ruess as well as his own attempts to find him well into this century. There are legends. Stories. Myths and markings. Many deadends and blind alleys. The most heartbreaking passages relate Christopher and Stella Ruess’ indefatigable efforts to find their son. They fall prey to con-men and amateur historians and, in the process, lose their son’s irreplaceable artifacts. There is admittedly a little empathy for Roberts and his CSI-esque quest to discern whether remains found in Chinle Wash on the Navajo reservation are those of Everett Ruess. The science behind this study, the engagement of scientists from the University of Utah and the University of Colorado (and, as implied, the tacit prodding of the National Geographic Society) is truly fascinating. In fact, I found myself enjoying the last two hundred pages more than the first. The hunt for the man was, to my mind, more fascinating than the man himself. At the last, in closing, Roberts is less than contrite, maybe even defensive, perhaps deliberately refracting his involvement in the identification process.

Is Ruess a person the reader sympathizes with by the end of his tale? Is Roberts? Should they be?

Ruess lacks something of the self-sufficiency to be really lionized. Perhaps in time he would have gained the proper insight and wisdom, but alas, a mere twenty years does not a guru make. And Ruess’ latent racism and his periodic lapses into melodrama (forgivable, naturally, in a teen) make him less sympathetic. Don’t get me started on how he treats the dog. It is a difficult comparison to hold Ruess up against other travelers of note. John Muir, the two Jacks (London and Kerouac), and the aforementioned Christopher McCandless. For me, the obvious parallel is with the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, but oddly Roberts never mentions Bierce.

Krakauer observes in his forward that Finding Everett Ruess is Roberts’ best book. It probably is—half of it anyway. I’m still waiting for a better book out of Roberts.  

Roberto Bolano - *2666*

I’ve just finished the late Roberto Bolańo’s 2666. At 893 pages, it is an enormous brick of a book that defies simple description. Ostensibly, it is a work primarily concerned with and set in the fictional northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa in the mid-to-late 1990’s, though it is truly a transnational novel.

It is divided into five parts. The first three vary greatly in style and intent. “The Part About the Critics,” is a largely mundane story of a love quadrangle (one woman, three men; all scholars) and the participants’ preoccupation with a German novelist, one Benno Von Archimboldi. The second, “The Part About Amalfitano,” is a wildly surreal exploration of a professor and his estranged (and strange) wife. The third, “The Part About Fate” introduces a reporter and is a stylish variation on noir in the vein of David Lynch (who is name-dropped in this section, I cannot believe coincidentally). These first three portions, while connected only tangentially, combine into a mosaic of impending and cycling dread. We are witnesses to a gradual decline into chaos, in both an immediate and global sense: “…it’s a sign,” a character quips in Part Three. “’A sign of what?’ asked Fate. ‘That we’re living on a planet of lunatics,” said the editor.”

With Bolańo as our Virgil, we arrive at the threshold of the abyss in the novel’s fourth section: “The Part About the Crimes” and Bolańo wastes no time in descending even further. Abandon all hope, indeed.

Part Four, the anchor, is primarily concerned with narrating the events and circumstances around the deaths of 400 some odd women in Santa Teresa. Frequently, Bolańo writes in gruesome detail about their separate (yet frequently referred to as collective) fates. In the hands of a less skilled writer, the novel would become just another exercise or example of misogyny or “horror porn.” Rather than thrilling to the murders of so many women, what we find is that the relentless onslaught, the description after description after description, is eventually and unfortunately – though perhaps purposefully – desensitizing.  Conversely, other stories appearing between the killings more fully engage us. How is it that a story about church desecration, for example, enraptures more than the fates of the factory women? Why are we more invested? It is a complete irony: we care more about the sensational events that happen in the churches – mere buildings, really – than we do about the women, the humanity, the church is designed to serve. The same can be said to a greater or lesser degree about the events that transpire in a prison. Like the guards who remove their hats and take out cameras to film the atrocities perpetrated on and by the inmates, we are riveted to the scene, invested more in the criminals than the victims. Bolańo indicts us as voyeurs of the worst sort.

That is exemplar of Bolańo’s real point here: how can the killings of so many women be casually dismissed out of hand? The reader, numbed by the descriptions, is complicit. We shrug. The narrative departures from the killing catalog are largely about the men (The Penitent, Juan de Dios Martinez, Klaus Haas, the narcos, etc.). These stories draw us in more fully and are more fascinating. Part of that is stylistic – Bolańo presents the masculine stories with more artistry and flair. The killings themselves are somewhat coldly and journalistically described with an air of detachment. Figuratively and stylistically, they are newspaper clippings or police reports. It is a tribute to Bolańo’s technique that he can execute on these stylistic back-and-forths with seeming effortlessness and a completely unified voice. Through these devices, Bolańo amplifies our sense of separation from the women and their fate. Bolańo seems to be saying ours is a society that wants to own, consume, and ultimately dispose of women. Until that changes, what hope is there for anything else? Any other kind of real, significant meaning? How can you not see this hell around you?

The sensation is cumulative over the first four sections: the female scholar, the professor’s wife and daughter, the reporter’s mother, the murdered women. The gradual descent. The fourth section is the exclamation, the shouting from the proverbial rooftop.

And then there’s that enigmatic title. It is a cue from the artist. 2666: “To 666” or “To Hell.” It’s not a year, folks, it’s a destination. But is there a difference? We’re talking eventualities here.

The final portion is devoted to the German novelist Benno Von Archimboldi referred to in sections 1 and 2. It is the story of Hans Reiter and his transformation over time from an imaginative child and caring brother into an adult. Born in 1920, Reiter grows into manhood and is quickly enlisted into the German service, fighting in World War 2 along the Russian Front. Bolańo uses his stories-within-stories-within-stories device here to great effect. We observe Reiter’s evolutions and devolutions and his life and loves. Despite some very grisly descriptions of war and the horrors of Nazi Germany, this section has the most cohesive narrative structure overall. And, despite the fact that there have been countless narratives about World War 2 and Nazi Germany, we are really entering new terrain here. Bolańo’s take on the scene is surreal and dramatic and artistic. The recursive nature amplifies the question implicit in the narrative: what is the role of the artist in our chaotic and often nightmarish world?

As readers, we carry with us into Part Five the expectation is that, somehow, this last section will bring all of the diverse elements of the novel together. That it will, as Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner, make “the whole thing fall into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle when the magician's wand touched it." Alas, it is not to be. What we get instead is a glimpse into the writer’s life and perhaps a small window on the artist’s role in challenging the chaotic nature of the universe. Is Archimboldi a stand-in for Bolańo himself? The mysterious man? The ever elusive author? Who knows?

In terms of style, 2666 is written simply, the prose unornamented. In those places where Bolańo does offer up a strange, uniquely-his-own metaphor (“They moved like commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet.”), it is a bit jarring. The denser passages and the paragraphs that go on for pages can become a little hypnotic. The stories within stories element in all of the parts is a nice narrative device. It works in 2666 just as well as it does in other favorite novels: Don Quixote and Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing come to mind. It makes the narrative richer, more real, and yet still manifests the characteristics of a dream. I cannot quite bring myself to call it a flaw in execution that, sometimes, at the ends of these little vignettes, I had to page back and return to the context of the linear narrative that led into the tangent. I blame myself for getting sucked into the departure so completely.

In the end, 2666 is a discordant piece of music. Our mind’s ear craves some resolution to that discord. Or maybe it is a riddle that requires an answer, a solution to the puzzle.  What we discover is that the answer to the riddle is that there is no riddle, no puzzle, and hence no answers or solutions. Or, if you prefer, the music is the discord, the puzzle is the answer. The artist celebrates this disconnect and, for all its unpleasantness, makes it worth beholding.