Basil Street Blues

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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.