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Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd HC/DJ (2000)

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Item number:390017374709
Item location:Woburn, MA, United States
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Item specifics - Nonfiction Books
Author: Michael HolroydPublisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
ISBN-10: 0393048500Subject: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN-13: 9780393048506Topic: --
Format: HardcoverLanguage: --
Publication Year: 2000Condition: Like New
Special Attributes: --  
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Detailed item info
Synopsis
Novelist and biographer Holroyd tells the story of his family's life from their glory days as officers in colonial India and wealthy tea-plantation owners to shabbier times, when Holroyd's parents divorced and managed to squander what little family money was left. Anecdotes from English prep school abound, as do tales of the various ways he endured his parents' embarrassing habits.

Size
Length:306 pages
Height:9.8 in.
Width:6.3 in.
Thickness:1.2 in.
Weight:21.6 oz.

Publisher's Note
Part detective story, part family saga, and part oblique voyage of self-discovery, this book belongs on the shelf beside C. S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy. Not long before his parents died in the 1980s, Michael Holroyd asked them to write some account of their early lives. These two documents, which, where they do overlap, differ dramatically--they do not even agree on the date of Michael's birth--mark the starting point of this book. A biographer by profession, Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But old photograph albums, papers found in the lining of an evening bag, and crumbling documents in various public record offices gradually yield clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a long, slow decline from English nobility on one side, and on the other a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry that could have been imagined by Isak Dinesen. Fatal fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of a fabulous Indian tea fortune . . . all these flow from the pages of his parents' recollections, to which he adds his own. Basil Street Blues is a memoir marked by humor, gentle irony, and a deeply sympathetic understanding of human failings. Its most interesting portrait is that of the author himself, the keeper of such an extravagant heritage.

Industry reviews
"[T]he shabbiest of shabby-genteel stories....Tense, fraught, uneasy, but mining that unease to poignant effect, BASIL STREET BLUES is an extraordinary piece of work, which takes its place alongside John Gale's CLEAN YOUNG ENGLISHMAN, Richard Cobb's STILL LIFE, and Anthony Powell's TO KEEP THE BALL ROLLING as a classic of English autobiography."
Times Literary Supplement  (09/17/1999)

"All modern autobiographers seem to think of themselves as outsiders, solitaries, especially if they were writers before they turn to self-revelation. Certainly this book is written. For all the evidence that the atmosphere of his home was 'saturated with unhappiness' the book that describes it sounds reasonably contented....[This is] an autobiography that tries as hard as possible to be a set of biographies."
London Review of Books - Frank Kermode (10/28/1999)

"[I]n immersing himself in the lives of the very people he struggled to keep at a distance, Holyroyd has written perhaps his best book yet. By turns damning and delightful, frothing with hilarity but always pulled by a strong undertow of sadness, in the tradition of Anthony Powell and Angus Wilson it evokes a postwar English world of genteel decay, tea in good china, and repressed emotion."
New York Times Book Review - Ben MacIntyre (03/26/2000)


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