Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great American voice, 17 Oct 2004
Like Steinbeck and Kerouac before him, you can hear America is his words. Those looking for insider gossip, showbiz revelations or a straghtforward narrative need to look elsewhere. The book starts with his arrival in New York City in 1961, beautifully evocative and kind hearted. Lovingly bringing to life those people around him, some more famous names than others, it has a unique sense of time and place. Amazing details show a true poetic licence in full flow. He describes the furniture in a friend's apartment in exhaustive detail; the place comes alive. He then writes that the apartment had "about 5 or 6 rooms". New York city, like the past, is another country. We then jump cut (nicely missing out his most famous period) to the late 60s and early 70s, living in seclusion in Woodstock, trying to raise a family while his generation come calling for their lost leader. His polite but solid rejection of the misguided, unworkable '60s ideals is nothing new - he said as much at the time. Maybe now people will finally get it. He belongs almost to a different time, a stranger world, that "old weird America". His fascination with Robert Johnson speaks volumes. His later work is beginning to capture this weirdness. The chapters concerning the writng and recording of "Oh Mercy" are revealing. They show that when he has the right producers, musicians, and motivations, he can make something great. The book is littered with fascinating asides - pen portraits of working musicians rather than pampered superstars, detours into the civil war, gods, generals and literature. There's a playfulness at work. Sly jokes appear here and there. He reveals that he wrote an album based on the short stories of Chekov, but doesn't tell you which one. Shaggy dog stories of old men on Southern porches, and trudging through swamps to get to Woody Guthrie's house. Everyone he writes about comes alive, positively. It's a great book from a great American voice. I expected nothing less
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
roll on two and three, 28 Nov 2004
I guess like everybody else here, I should declare an interest - I really like Bob Dylan and while sometimes I am a little disappointed by his musical outpourings, I don't regret a purchase and basically think pretty much all of it has something going for it. This is probably true for most of these reviewers...When it came to Chronicles, I was worried - Dylan has the potential of course to tell a fantastic story, but also to make a terrible mess of telling the story. In this case I would have liked to rate the book with four and a half stars, because while it is without doubt the best book on Dylan I've read (and I've read a few), there are points where some editing would not have gone amiss. I've gone with five stars because the first section, on Dylan's early hears in New York, is simply wonderful, as is the bit on the Woodstock years - I could read another five hundred pages on that lot quite happily. However, the middle section on the recording of Oh Mercy, is a bit on the long side, and I was not quite sure why it was included in such depth. Sure the stuff on Dylan's "new vocal technique", which would allow him to sing for hours with no fatigue, is weirdly fascinating, but also kind of aimless; a shorter section on this would have worked much better. We close up back in New York, with fame and success crowning the horizon, and of course, Bob doesn't let you down... Dylan's writing style is his own of course, he's conversational and very definitely has his own voice, which you probably know very well indeed by now, and he has a few tricks up his sleeve, his favourite is a kind of cinematic flash-back which is a rather crude device, but executed with a touching naivety, and like most everything else in Chronicles, it fits. If you have any interest in Dylan at all, you obviously want this book. Let's have two and three nice and quickly please Bob.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
NOT FOR BEGINNERS, 3 Aug 2005
By A Customer
This book's as good as the best reviews says it is and a whole lot more besides, and I believe the people here who say they don't like it are lying, or joking, or confused (eg, the fellow complaining that "for some reason" Dylan, 1 of the most influential and groundbreaking musicians of the 20th century, here devotes a whole page of the book to outlining his musical theory - ).Chronicles isn't the usual celebrity autobiography - it's not about childhood tramaus, or Battles with Bulimia, or near-fatal accidents and platitudes, or brand new diets that worked for Bob - and is not even the usual literary autobiography. It is a work of fiction, the same way that "Desolation Row" or "High Water" are works of fiction, and creates a reality more recognisable than the one that exists: or, in the case, existed. Dylan is similar to Kerouac not only in his lovingly-detailed prose but also in the way that his concerns with memory and time suffuse this lovingly-detailed, life-affirming prose with such an overriding sense of melancholy, and gives it the same beautiful autumnal quality. The book, like memory, is structured thematically rather than chronologically; and some people here joke that the years selected by Dylan to concentrate were, in fact, randomly chosen. Not true. Ch. 1: 1961 and Dylan "riding the wave" of destiny; Ch. 2: 1968, the wave has the shore, and Dylan doesn't like where he's landed; Ch. 3: 1987 a mysterious hand accident has led him to reevaluate his music and, essential, recreate it anew; Ch. 4: he is back where he started, 1961, riding the wave of destiny. Beautiful. Generously written, carefully structured, lovingly-detailed, with stunningly crisp and clear evocations of a variety of characters and places, it really is a wonderful piece of writing. Since this is the man who wears a false beard for inspiration, and whose "official position" on drugs is that "I can take them - or I can leave them" - there is, of course, Dylan's incomparable flashes of humour. eg, in Chapter 3, Dylan takes a mouthful of something his daughter-in-law's cooking in a pot; she asks him if he likes it; he nods his head: "Smells tasty," he says. HA!!!!!!!!-------
The cat's in the well, honey, and the wolf's looking down:
Things should start to get interesting right about now.
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