Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Flamingo Modern Classics)

It is in fact a modern Gatsby. "The Great Gatsby" is one of the greatest novels of the century, and Thompson was well aware of Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Both novels deal with that particular characteristic of the American mindset summed up in the phrase "the American Dream"... this is characterised by two things: (1) a belief in agency, or the power of the individual to shape his or her own life and (2) a disregard for the past in preference of the future. Jay Gatsby embodied agency in the sense that he invented himself, and he showed his disregard for the past because he spent all his time trying to get Daisy to return to a time before she met Tom. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is just as complex as Gatsby though there isn't space to properly go into it here... But, for starters:

Has anyone else noticed that the first half of the novel is almost exactly the same as the second half? they are structurally identical. the hitch-hiker is replaced by Lucy, one hotel is replaced by another, one car by another, etc. This is not necessarily Thompson's laziness... the past repeating itself is a recurrent theme (is Bush the Nixon of our generation? different?). Thompson is smarter than most people give him credit for and if you want to get anything "solid" from this book then you should try to engage with it on an intelligent level... Thompson's/Duke's actions represent the amazing possibilities which lie at the heart of the American Dream... "but only for those with true grit" ... Thompson makes the seventies a failure of the sixties...

Additional: his recent work may be sub-par (or comparatively so) but buy his volumes of collected letters; they show a man who gets enormous joy from real writing (spending a lot of time getting the words "just so" - this is the mark of a real writer...).


look out!   May 7, 2004
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

if you`re anything like me and packed your bag before finishing "on the road" then you`re unlikely to finish this before the end of an ugly bender. that aside when you finally return to normality you might find that hunter thompson wasn`t so far off the mark; the american dream is ugly and depraved and hasn`t changed yet, and we in the uk aren`t as different as we might like to think. this is an excellent book.


Hilarious, disturbing and important   April 18, 2003
Depressaholic (London, UK)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Hunter Thompson twists a job covering a bike race into a search for the American dream, and the results are savage and funny. This time was one of crooks in the White House and kids in Vietnam, Charles Manson killing the hippy dream and Simon and Garfunkel dropping their hippy ditties to record 'Bookends' and bemoan the death of America. To a drug addled Raoul Duke (Thompson's alter ego) and his attourney the desert bike race becomes the last vestige of what America had lost in the twentieth century but, as they drive across the desert consuming a trunkful of chemicals, their fear takes over. Their mission (to find the American dream) becomes lost in a paranoid haze, and they recede further from their goal as they just try to keep their heads above water in the new, dreamless USA.
The behaviour of the pair is incredibly funny (especially in the first half of the book), and Thompson makes Duke's world instantly make sense, even though you know it only makes sense to him (e.g. when he becomes trapped in the hotel lobby surrounded by lizards and thinks that he will not escape alive unless he can acquire some golf shoes). However, this is not just some drugged up buddy-book. It is the successor to Kerouac's 'On the Road', but with all the hope of that book extinguished. America is seedy and sordid and the gaurdians of righteousness are now fat bloated cops (like the ones from Easy Rider, as Duke points out). Freedom is carefully martialled, so the only freedom available to Duke is fast cars and dangerous drugs. The conversation with a burger joint waitress in which they decide that the American Dream was a bar a couple of blocks away that had since been knocked down is heartbreaking, and a fine finale to a glorious book.