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Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson review - loaded with highs
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson has crafted a crazed, depraved, shocking, insightful, uncontrolled, controlled and studied prose roman a clef novel that centres around the aftermath of the counter culture of the 1960s.
If you haven’t read the book before, it’s a fictional story that follows Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr Gonzo on their wild journey to Las Vegas, off their tiny little teats on a concoction of alcohol and drugs. Sort of autobiographically based on a similar trip by Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, Fear and Loathing is, for me, a loaded set of questions about what went wrong with the counter cultural revolution of the the 1960s.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the wave speech, in which Thompson likens the end of the era to a “high and beautiful wave” that crashed and slipped back. It is within the rest of the novel that in and amongst the churning prose Mr. Duke exposes the crest’s demise to a backward seep of corrosive depravity, excess and the infiltration of the less sublime.
Illustrated by Ralph Steadman, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an amazing book that has to be read to be believed, and even then you’ll be left with doubts. Fast paced, brutal and beautiful all at the same time, it’s a book that has be read.
4/5
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