After the flood Inside Bob Dylan's memory palace

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, biographer Polito (Savage Art) reframes Bob Dylan's "second thirty years" as a period of unprecedented creativity and growth. Arranging the account in a loose and mostly nonchronological structure, Polito plumbs the dizzying array of sources Dylan drew on from 1991 to 2024 as he revised and expanded his body of work. He pulled from Ovid and little-remembered 19th-century Southern poet Henry Timrod to comment on the legacy of slavery in 2006's Modern Times, for example, and wove F. Scott Fitzgerald, Othello, and other influences into 2001's Love and Theft, an album at once autobiographical and sweeping in its commentary on race, American history, and popular music. In the process, Dylan mixed so-called "folk process" with literary modernism to further evolve his songwriting style. He also experimented with his performance style, utilizing a broader spectrum of tones with results that could be erratic or memorable ("When he's on, Dylan empathizes so intensively and absolutely with a song that he disappears inside the instant-upon-instant disclosure of it"). Polito's analyses are intricate and revealing, if occasionally overwhelming--one chapter spends several pages scrutinizing inscriptions in Dylan's high school yearbook. Intimate details and astute critiques coalesce into a rich portrait of an artist ceaselessly remaking himself. Dylan devotees couldn't ask for a more thorough consideration of an under-studied part of his oeuvre. (Jan.)

A ramble through the latter-day work of the ever-estimable Bob Dylan. "No, notthat Bob Dylan," writes literary biographer and anthologist Polito: not the Dylan of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Tangled Up in Blue," but the far lesser-known Dylan of albums such asRough and Rowdy Ways andEmpire Burlesque. Polito starts with a smart assessment of Dylan's accomplishments since the 1990s: more than 3,000 concerts, two books, a movie, a weekly radio show, art exhibits on three continents. A point of constant return is one of Dylan's most recent masterworks, the nearly 17-minute-long epic song "Murder Most Foul," a major piece in the "memory palace" of Polito's subtitle. The classical memory palace was a medieval construct for remembering by mentally populating its rooms with facts: Dylan, by Polito's lights, is constructing "mental structures, particularly songs, that will house past and present, the living and the dead." One aspect is Dylan's turn to the Great American Songbook and the albums of traditional folk songs he recorded in the 1990s. As always, Dylan is an elusive figure in his own story; as Polito sagely notes, he may have begun his renaissance with a Keith Richards--like earring and black leather jacket, but he soon would dress in hoodies and eye-hiding hats and sunglasses "that declared he didn't want to be there." Yet Dylan was there, always, almost ubiquitous. As Polito also notes, not everything Dylan produced in his legendary career was spun of gold: Even die-hard Dylan heads have to admit that late '80s albums likeDown in the Groove andKnocked Out Loaded are dogs. (Rather uncharitably, Dylan lays the blame for the ups and downs of his 1997 albumTime Out of Mind on its producer, Daniel Lanois.) But let Dylan have the last word: "That's my story but not where it ends." An insightful look at Dylan's lesser-known works, in all their multitudes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.