BOB DYLAN

A counterintuitive look at the underlying, too-little-understood themes of a shape-shifter’s work.

Rosenbaum’s “Sort of Biography” proposes that Bob Dylan’s work is influenced, however subconsciously, by “theodicy,” an argument with God over the justification of evil in the world in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Equally inventively, the author proposes that the Nobel Prize winner’s constant reinvention is foreshadowed by the “discontinuity of selves” described by Jorge Luis Borges. Everything old is new again. These are dizzying, certainly arguable theories, but one would expect no less from Rosenbaum, an eclectic New Journalist whose previous work includes Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which may help explain his theological bent here, and an Esquire piece on “phone phreaks” that reportedly inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak back in the day. Rosenbaum previously interviewed Dylan as the singer was editing his four-hour epic, Renaldo and Clara, in which Dylan identified the “thin, wild mercury sound’’ he was seeking, in a phrase that’s since become the lodestone for innumerable blogs. It’s a jumping-off point for this book, which avoids the temptations of conventional recitations of the singer’s life and career and the nodular exegeses of the “Bobolators” who lose objectivity in the pursuit of obsessed fandom. In a turn of thought that may seem equally obsessive, the author denounces Dylan’s Christian Slow Train Coming era as the byproduct of a “mind-control…brainwashing cult,” though it might be equally valid to acknowledge it as a response to the personal challenges he was facing at the time. Regardless, it’s a pleasure to encounter a mind as brilliant and unpredictable as its subject.

An essential, contrarian volume that offers rare insights and rewarding perspectives.