… to point out that Chronicles is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it’s genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one — his sense of strategy vis-a-vis his audience hasn’t been this keen in 30 years — and it’s a zesty, nugget-filled read. His assessments of other musicians are as acute as they are idiosyncratic, partly because (no great surprise here) he instinctively zeroes in on their personae in the guise of talking about their music, as in this jambalaya of observations about Roy Orbison: ”He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. . . He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.” Better still is a terse explanation of what separated Hank Williams from most 50’s country-and-western singers: ”There was nothing clownish about him.”
~Tom Carson (The New York Times Sunday Book Review)

For any kind of Dylan fan, this is a MUST read. Endlessly fascinating.

Most great books I read needs to be mind mapped before I can leave them in peace. This book demands a detailed mind map, so I’ll split the posts into “chapter mind maps”.

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Off the beaten path as it is, Chronicles is nevertheless an astonishing achievement. As revelatory in its own way as Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited, it provides ephemeral insights into the mind one of the most significant artistic voices of the 20th century while creating a completely new set of mysteries.
–Steven Stolder (amazon.com)

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• the Grey nodes are quotes from the book
• the Blue nodes are from wikipedia
• other nodes are my comments

Check out:

• The DYLANOLOGISTS – a kind of review (part 1)
• The DYLANOLOGISTS – a kind of review (part 2)

-Egil