Basil Street Blues [Large Print] [Paperback]

Michael Holroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2002

Michael Holroyd is one of the finest biographers of our time yet he was never interested in exploring his own familys history until the death of his parents in the 1980s. Then, faced with a sudden vacuum, he felt a desire to fill it with the stories of their lives.Basil Street Blues, the first of his volumes of memoir, is part detective story, part family memoir and part an oblique voyage of self-discovery which is both startlingly comic and profoundly moving. In his follow-up volume, Mosaic, he delves deeper into his family history. Witty, touching and wry, Mosaic shows the strange interconnectedness of our lives, and how other peoples stories, however eccentric or extreme, echo our own dreams and experiences.These two volumes  published together for the first time here  form an extraordinary piece of writing, and an enthralling lesson in identity and perspective for both author and reader.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The distinguished biographer of Lytton Strachey and Bernard Shaw turns his trained eye on his kin in a thoughtful work that is as much a meditation on the nature of biography as a family memoir. Basil Street Blues has its origins in recollections Michael Holroyd asked his parents to write in the late 1970s, long after their 12-year marriage had ended. They agreed about little, not even the date of their son's birth in 1935, and Holroyd probes these discrepancies with the same brisk lucidity he has brought to subjects less intimately connected to his own life. Readers accustomed to the woe-is-me authorial stance frequently assumed in currently fashionable memoirs of familial dysfunction will be surprised by the impartial sympathy and considerable humor with which Holroyd depicts the financial, social, and sexual missteps of his parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Perhaps it's Anglo-Saxon stoicism inherited from his British father, perhaps the Scandinavian fatalism of his Swedish mother, but Holroyd has an impressive ability to view even his own youthful unhappiness with calm detachment. His elegantly written chronicle of "secret episodes and half-suspected dramas" nicely achieves its declared purpose: "to pare back a little the cuticle of time and to apply the research methods I have learnt as a biographer to my own life." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Affectionate and wry, Holroyd's memoir of his dysfunctional family contrasts sharply with his lives of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, which have earned him a major reputation as a biographer. His parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are largely what Shaw would have called "downstarts"--people crumbling from comfort and even affluence into pinched existences. Apparently of no serious consequence or achievement, they are nonetheless worth reading about because they have escaped ordinariness through Holroyd's ability to capture their extravagances. Holroyd prides himself on achieving "a good walk-on part in one's own autobiography," and while he succeeds in that, the tale's charm emerges from his mother and father, Swedish and British, respectively: their meeting onboard a ship; their secret marriage; Holroyd's childhood with assorted adults, including grandparents and stepparents; his parents' separation and subsequent episodes in their lives. Among the delightfully recounted anecdotes is one about Holroyd, as a young man, drafting a letter for his mother explaining why she was deserting his stepfather to go to South America; at his stepfather's request ("'You're a writer,' he said"), Holroyd then penned a reply to his mother, which began "what, for eighteen months or so, was to be an elaborate international correspondence with myself." As he weaves his own life lightly in and out of his family's vagaries, he leaves behind the handicaps of impecuniosity, shyness and miseducation and finds himself among helpful literati, becoming one of them. Although this title is what writers refer to as a between-books book (Holroyd is researching a new biography), it rises artfully above that class. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Isis Large Print Books (September 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753197154
• ISBN-13: 978-0753197158
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,599,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Champagne Cocktail of a Memoir, March 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Basil Street Blues (Hardcover)

Michael Holroyd's "Basil Street Blues" is a marvelously readable memoir by the biographer of Lytton Strachey and others. Holroyd's early life in England before, during and after WWII was filled with a cast of eccentrics-- one grandmother occasionally sported a monocle, the other shouted the odd word in French; his mother was compared in every way to champagne; his father was "a most unlikely old Etonian;" and the waning family fortune came several generations back from Rajmai Tea, a company whose dramatic ups and downs proved "better than a seat at the opera." Holroyd cleverly explains how this oddball cast of characters ultimately led him into the profession of writing biography. This is a wonderful story, told not without pathos and humor. One hopes for a sequel.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A biography lovers dream, October 13, 2000

By 

not applicable (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Basil Street Blues (Hardcover)

This is one of the most beautifully constructed books ....beginning slowly with an introduction too Holroyd's unusal ancestors .... his own shyness and youth among various estranged folks, and then building to a wonderful, generous, end.

I was quite overwhelmed as the last few chapters came round. I am highly recommending it to readers

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading the Lines of Basil Street Blues and Between Them, April 19, 2000

By 

April Wilson (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Basil Street Blues (Hardcover)

Although Michael Holroyd had a difficult life growing up among eccentrics, his beautiful prose and gentle sense of humor show that he nonetheless emerged as a remarkably insightful, down-to-earth adult. His descriptions of the people who influenced him are wonderfully observant, and kinder than most of the people probably deserved. On page 142, he notes that what he can reveal "emerges more between the lines of my writing," and he gives us ample lines to read between. I would strongly recommend Basil Street Blues to anyone interested in the art of memoir writing, as well as anyone interested in knowing more about Holroyd.