From the moment he became a name that people began to recognize, Bob Dylan has maintained he can't — or won't — be known through his personal history. At age twenty he told interviewers he rode boxcars and had worked carnies, that he'd driven a bakery truck and worked construction. It was all "hokum — hophead talk" he says now, but it was a way of keeping people out of the private details of his life. This attitude, of course, had the effect of giving Dylan a sense of myth and mystery, whether he intended it or not. He is a key to understanding the social and cultural changes of the Sixties, but the key has never been willing to talk about what happened.

That is, until now. In Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster) — a collection of open, revealing memoir-meditations — Dylan has chosen to share some of his passages of life. He goes deep into a handful of periods — his early, prerecording years in New York; his self-imposed late-1960s exile in Woodstock, New York; and his late-1980s malaise, as he recorded the 1987 disc Oh Mercy. These are all times when Dylan was on the verge of epochal discoveries, or reeling from their aftereffects. If you're looking for divulgences about Dylan's rumored drug-dazed flameout in 1966, at the peak of his fame, or about his guarded love affairs and marriages, you won't find those remembrances here. He mentions a wife here and there across the decades, but it isn't always the same wife, and he never gives her a name.

But what he does reveal about himself is far more interesting. For one, Chronicles makes plain that Dylan isn't the distant figure who became more internalized after the height of his fame in the mid-Sixties. Just the opposite: He has always watched his world — our world — closely. He remembers everything and everybody. As a result, we're inside Dylan's head like we've never been before, and it's a mesmerizing place.

The book opens — and it closes — circa 1961-62, in New York. Dylan, still underage, has come to Greenwich Village from the Midwest. He tells this part of his story in vivid language — plain-spoken yet as distinctive as any of his best lyrics. He conjures up rooms full of living history, full of the famous and the unknown, and he tells us how they walked, talked, looked and why they mattered, from Harry Belafonte and Woody Guthrie to Jack Dempsey and Tiny Tim (the latter whom Dylan shared french fries with when they were both working for food). Through it all, Dylan has intimations that something big might crack open inside him. "I could transcend the limitations," he writes. "It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity." He looks everyplace for ideas: in the ancient histories of Tacitus and Thucydides; in the poems of Ovid, Milton and in Edgar Allan Poe. In the New York Public Library, he settles into reading American newspapers on microfilm from 1861 to 1865 — the Civil War era, in which America was divided and kinsman killed kinsman. "You wonder," he writes, "how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies.... Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."

Near Chronicles' end, Dylan returns to the same time and place — Greenwich Village in the early 1960s — and fills in more details. The moment when he would see how to grasp his art and meet the times inches closer here. He meets seventeen-year-old Suze Rotolo, with whom he has a famed, tempestuous romance, and who takes him to the city's museums, where he sees works by Goya, El Greco, Kandinsky and Picasso. The latter particularly grabs him. "Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open," he notes. "He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that." Rotolo also introduces him to the paintings and constructions of modernist Red Grooms, who rendered the inhabitants of the everyday world in ways uncommon to art. Grooms' work jolts Dylan. "There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang," he writes. "What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually — all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys.... Subconsciously, I was wondering if it was possible to write songs like that."