What do coincidences mean? As I was reading Nicholas Salaman's elaborately-patterned historical paranoia novel The Grimace, in which all the women the cracked narrator encounters are called Johanna, I came across the phrase 'visions of Johannas'. It gave me a shock to realise that the song 'Visions of Johanna', by Bob Dylan, at which Salaman nods just this once, was at the same moment playing quietly on my stereo, which it does perhaps once a year. I didn't bother to try to compute the odds against this happening, and left it as a sharp earful of what Paul Auster calls 'the music of chance'.

LRB 9 May 1991 | PDF Download