![]() They scream like a declaration of intent, as if the reader has just jumped into an already unfolding narrative and has missed some important specifics the narrator bawls the only feasible line he can fathom that will inform the reader what they have missed and where they are now. ![]() Gonzo, a thinly disguised Oscar Zeta Acosta, whose exploits the book will unravel. To me, those eighteen words say more than stating simple geography and the impending drug wave that will grip the two strange individuals of Thompson’s alter ego and narrator, Raoul Duke, and his Samoan companion Dr. I savour them every time I reread the book, before diving head first into the collision of overreaching madness, laugh-out-loud hysteria and aching beauty that lies ahead. I fully expect them, yet am always utterly surprised when they appear at the top of the page. Both texts paint a grim picture of what it was like to live in those transitional times.įear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first editionHowever, before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas even delves into this schism, it is those opening lines that first grab me. Dennis Hopper, 1969), on the cusp of a new decade, pointed towards a shedding of the sixties vision of the American Dream and replaced it with a rendering of an overbearing capitalist interpretation that was obsessed with status and money. Much in the same way, the film Easy Rider (dir. It reflects the loss of a utopia and chronicles its spiral into violence and mass cultural sell-out. As I’m now heading, rattling and aching, towards my mid-thirties, the book has stayed with me for over a decade, and on every read I discover a new angle or interpretation that expands its meaning.įear and Loathing holds an almost mythic quality in its mix of Gonzo reportage, drug frenzies and soulful meditation of the Sixties’ generation of America. Thompson’s seminal 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, a book, which give or take a few missed opportunities, I have endeavoured to read once a year since first picking it up at the tender age of 19. ![]() “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”Īnd so begins the first sentence to Hunter S.
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