Tarantula Book

What the mentally disturbed Dylanologists have never understood over the course of Zimmy's six-decade spanning career is that to scour the man's lyrics for hidden truths is a fool's errand. It's a simple trick to understand Bob Dylan, really: all you have to do is approach his lyrics at their apparent meaning. So when Dylan crows:

"Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"

there's no need to dig further than the emotive qualities of the image itself. Dylan has always been something of a lyrical impressionist: his songs are tone poems which seek to promote feelings of unrest or longing or confusion or disenfranchisement or indignation depicted within the given snippet of narrative that Dylan loves to ornament his songs with. To deconstruct more rigorously is to miss the point'like trying to appreciate a painting with a microscope.

And so we come to the problem of Tarantula, Bob Dylan's "novel" of 1966. First off, it is not a novel. It's not even a collection of poems since most of the vignettes collected throughout defy even the most liberal application of that term. If anything, Tarantula is a catalog of Dylan's brain storming. It's a litany of images tacked together clumsily with an endless stream of ampersands (&). And if looked at that way, then you may get a few joys out of the book. Seeing as I am a fan of Dylan's Jabberwockyesque depictions of deadbeats and outcasts, I was able to flip through this book pleasantly enough at first, smiling at young Dylan's mischievous bursts of wordplay and absurdist wit. The best bits of the book were the letters with which he signs off every "chapter." These are just silly strands of concern or well-wishing that always end with humorous sign-offs like, "Stompingly yours, Lazy Henry," or "Helpfully yours, Sir Cringe." If Tarantula had been a collection of these letters with their terrific nonce-names, this would have been an easy four-star read. But even for a rabid fan like me, Tarantula is a repetitive read and somewhat of a chore to complete. There's very little variety or significance to any one of the chapters so even the most spirited and good-willed reader is left with little to remember from the experience of thumbing through page after page.

All in all, this is a slight piece of literary salmagundi for only the most dedicated of Dylan fans to slobber over.