The Oysters of Locmariaquer

by Eleanor Clark

Winner of the National Book Award

“What an elegant book this is, starting with that most elegant of creatures, the Belon oyster. . . . [Clark’s] fantastic blending of science and art, history and journalism, brings the appetite back for life and literature both.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

On the northwest coast of France, just around the corner from the English Channel, is the little town of Locmariaquer (pronounced "loc-maria-care"). The inhabitants of this town have a special relationship to the world, for it is their efforts that maintain the supply of the famous Belon oysters, called les plates ("the flat ones"). A vivid account of the cultivation of Belon oysters and an excursion into the myths, legends, and rich, vibrant history of Brittany and its extraordinary people, The Oysters of Locmariaquer is also an unforgettable journey to the heart of a fascinating culture and the enthralling, accumulating drama of a unique devotion.

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction, France, Travel, Nature, Science

276 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Eleanor Clark (July 6, 1913–February 16, 1996) was born in Los Angeles and attended Vassar College in the 1930s. She was the author of the National Book Award winner The Oysters of Locmariaquer, Rome and a Villa, Eyes, Etc., and the novels The Bitter Box, Baldur's Gate, and Camping Out. She was married to Robert Penn Warren.

Reviews

[Aaron Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the OG of "history of a food" books (I think Mark Kurlansky even writes the preface). I learned a great deal from this book, and I really would love to proclaim my love for it, but it just doesn't seem to be the case. What gives? Eleanor Clark is a sparklingly beautiful woman of the mid twentieth century; whip smart, inquisitive and with an amazing lust for life. She's done more than her homework on the subject and even inhabited one of the locales lovingly described in TOOL. For all this I couldn't help but stumble on Mrs. Clark's prose style. Like one of the oysters we come to know so well by the books end, I found the syntax and writing style very dense and intricate. By paragraphs end, I had forgotten what was the subject of paragraphs start. Managing a chapter was like being a jogger who can cover a mile attempting an ultra marathon. By the end, this book made me long for Bruce Chatwain's "On a Black Hill", and its simple, highly readable prose. Perhaps you'll experience it differently, its certainly worth the effort.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book that finds the entire universe in an oyster shell. Suffused with a sense of the dignity of labor, the complexity of human relationships to each other and to a place, and the mysteries of the natural world, which science explains and explains and makes more mysterious than ever. Poetic and surprising. Highest possible recommendation.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in the early 1960's about a small town in France that revolved around the oyster industry. Interesting look into post-war rural France. The most interesting parts to me were about the local people, their lives, and their livelihood, and I would have liked a more sustained following of the individuals mentioned. Just when I got interested in one of them, the book took an extended foray into the history or science of oysters or the characters in Breton history or mythology. Although those things were good to know, I think they could have been woven more artfully, and in shorter sections, into the story about the lives of the participants. Additionally, the coverage of the townspeople was too superficial to be satisfying, and expectations were set up but not fulfilled when a relationship, for example, was hinted at but never developed or mentioned again. I liked it but have liked others in this genre more.

[Diann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the first chapter, lyrically written. I liked various parts within this. Yes, I know this book was written over 70 years ago, and there are styles I may no longer be used to (although I still love the even more "ancient" Mark Twain). Too many areas where I was falling asleep... At any rate, due to that marvelous first chapter, I read the entire book. I appreciated the natural history of this particular oyster (O. edulus) because I come from a biological background. I appreciated the history of how it was raised over a millennia, and I liked much of the other historical background of this region in northern France. But... the book drags. Sorry, it does. I can't motivate myself to give it the third star. Maybe 2.25? Working towards 2.5?

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.7, there are some amazing lines in this, but never have I wanted to tell an author slow down and catch their breath, until now. There is a frantic high-speed gulping quality to Clark's writing that made me feel like was drowning in facts and description all at the same time.

[Lauren Alwan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Late in Eleanor Clark’s extraordinary book, she tells us the oyster needs the same landscape that a plein air painter does: a certain air, light, chemistry. “The explanation,” she writes, “might be quite simple, not esoteric at all—in some common equation of factors and atmospheres.” Only a writer like Clark could find such a commonality, the kind you wander back to long after you’ve finish the book.

Though if your mind likes to wander while you’re reading, better to hold off on The Oysters of Locmariaquer. Clark’s sentence constructions require a certain patience—but the reward for your attention is being able to inhabit Clark’s mind. She seems to know virtually everything about this corner of northwestern France, the Celtic peninsula where Bretons have cultivated oysters for centuries—starting with a variety called Belon, or les plattes. You may not have heard of the famed oysters of Brittany, but they’re on the Smithsonian’s list of 1000 Things You Should Eat Before You Die. As Mark Kurlansky writes in his introduction, don’t expect a quaint travel book centered on francophilia. Clark is rarely sentimental, and can shift between scholarly authority and the sharp studies of Southern Gothic narrator.

Clark summered in Locmariaquer as a child, and in the June of 1961, she and her husband, the poet and writer Robert Penn Warren (whom she called “Red” and to whom the book is dedicated), arrived with their two children to rent a house and do some writing. Clark came to her book of oyster history and culture unexpectedly. In Brittany, she found herself fascinated by the area’s history of oystering, and I wonder if having spent summers there as a girl, some aspect of the place hadn’t embedded itself long before. Here’s Clark on the Gulf of Quiboran, the inlet off the Bay of Biscay where the municipality of Locmariquer sits:

“There is something hypnotic about the Gulf of Quiboran…some tender hand or breath must control its character: it is all a cradle, moving, bemused, strung with the baubles of summer villas but discreetly, under a blowing baby-laundry of fresh little clouds…”

The success of Oysters and another memoir of place, Rome and A Villa, find Clark often described as a travel writer, though she also wrote novels, stories, and criticism. The Oysters of Locmariaquer (first published in 1964) is a kind of biography of a place, containing history, science, literature, oyster cultivation, habitat, and the local life, which at the time of the book’s writing, was caught between the old ways and the new.

Clark shows us this place in time, and unpacks origins, meaning, and essence. Certainly this book is about oysters, from how they’re grown to how they mate, their eating habits and who, throughout history has eaten them. But the account is also about Locmariaquer, its people, history, geography, mythology, as well as the hard life that comes with oystering. With Clark’s assistance, we access the deeply personal, the thoughts and longings of a handful of characters, all of whom, difficult as their lives may be, don’t view their lives as tragic. A toothless elder whose daughter parks her under a local tree so she can see people and talk politics. A brother and sister who wonder at the horses corralled outside the abattoir. The terrible cold of 1963 that froze the oyster population and resulted in cultivating a new variety from scratch (a catastrophe that has happened more than once since then).

These personal accounts bend the account toward the novelistic, an unexpected turn but surely one reason why The Oysters of Locmariaquer is widely considered to have stretched the possibilities of nonfiction and influenced the contemporary essayistic style. The book also received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1965.

In a single long graph, we may be led, for example, past the scarcity of televisions in Locmariaquer (only the rich oysterers have them), to an extended study of the local postmistress—the only person in town with a telephone (“She sits as she stands, straight as a lily in stone”), to a local library that contains a book on oysters the author seeks. You have to keep up with Clark, you can’t let your attention waver. Otherwise, you risk losing out on the buried gems of her prose, like here, as she describes the library, which is private, called The Society of Many Learnings:

"It is reached eventually, in the garret or servants’ quarters of the Mairie, the imposing marble sweep of the first two flights of stairs giving way suddenly, through a small door, to a shabby little wooden third one leading up under the eaves. But this is proper. The true student wants no marble stairs and can do without a public toilet and a reading room; all he needs is books, and in this of all countries there must be plenty of those."

True, Clark’s collagist style has been influential—in all but one way. What has come to be known as the personal essay relies the speaker as a character, a persona that plays a role in the narrative. Yet never once does Clark cast herself in that role. There’s not one “I” in The Oysters of Locmariaquer. Though there’s no need. Clark is present in every line.

[B. Rule · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, how I wanted to like this book. It's a microhistory of a place, animal, and foodstuff that wears its literary pretensions on its sleeve, which all sounds wonderful. There are brief passages that are beautifully written and very evocative of the tiny area in Brittany that is the subject of the book. However, the bulk of the book is a mishmash of unfinished anecdotes, flip literary and historical allusions, arch half-jokes, and cruel excoriations of the Breton peasants Clark allegedly encountered. All that would be forgivable, except that the book as a whole lacks any organizational principle whatsoever. It meanders maddeningly through endless subjects that have only the most tenuous of connections to oysters. I wanted to learn about oysters, but found myself constantly stymied. Also, the writing style is infuriating for a natural history book. Clark cannot be bothered to write clearly and crisply about her lowly subject, and instead tosses off literary somersaults linked only by chains of indefinite pronouns. Thus, determining whether a particular description applies to Crassostrea or Ostrea requires a level of exegesis which flummoxed and annoyed me, and ultimately, caused me to set this one down before I had quite reached the end.

[Carol Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea of the book sounded promising: a glimpse of the life of a small village in Brittany and the importance of oysters to that life. I made it almost through the whole book, but just couldn't handle another chapter's worth of digressions and ramblings. It isn't that I don't enjoy the occasional ramble, and I'm sure the author must have been a most interesting person to talk to, but these ramblings all too often seemed to say to me, "Look how much I know about obscure topics--I'm sure you must be impressed." Many times they seemed to have little or nothing to do with oysters or the village. There were some interesting bits, such as the author's observations of the villagers' hands, roughened and shaped by the work they did in nurturing and harvesting the oysters. And some witty remarks that were almost hidden in the verbiage. But having put the book back on the shelf, I am happy to go on to something else.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little more information about the history, mystery, farming, harvesting, growing, range of, names of, etc. information about oysters than I was really expecting.
There are amusing and sometimes hilarious brief stories interwoven, along w myths, obvious lies, and folk tales...I just wish there had been MORE of THOSE and quite a bit LESS of the pedantic stuff.
But you know, even the pedantic stuff was quite readable, often amusing, frequently presented w tongue-firmly-in-cheek, such as this gem:
"Incidentally Pliny, more an egghead than a nature-lover, had an interesting view of oyster procreation. Following Aristotle, he says it comes about through spontaneous combustion in the mud."
Right.
Way to go, Pliny!

[Hailey Roussin-Guillemot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the whimsical style Clark writes in. That I was at times completely lost didn't diminish my enjoyment. I gobbled up the technical information along with the local stories, history, and descriptions. I found it quite poetic, and approached in this way I could let go of striving to follow every lead and let the author take me on her journey of discovery. Perhaps it helps that I am in the same geographic location as she was writing this. I will re-read this many times to catch the crumbs that fell in my initial haste.

[Andy Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious hybrid of a book that starts out as a history of oyster growing, using the Breton location of the title as an exemplar of the process, and ranges across a wide field of topics. Don't read it as a biology text - it is much more a hymn to a spirit of place and age, and that age rapidly passing even when Clark wrote the book in 1964. The language is a mix of highbrow, technical, demotic and poetic.

If you liked Mark Kurlansky's 'Salt' or Elizabeth David's 'Harvest of the Cold Months', this might appeal. But it is recondite, even outré at times.

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Believe it or not, I've finally finished this book! I began it in November of 2006 and, partly because it's nonfiction, read it in fits and spurts between then and now. Clark's writing is astonishing (every time I picked it up again, I was amazed to hear this woman from the 1950s still speaking loud and clear in her own voice) and she weaves together the history of Breton with the life cycle of the delicious Belon oyster (les plates)

[Jim Booth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Anyone who reads Eleanor Clark's classic The Oysters of Locmariaquer will come away from the book convinced of two things: 1) cultivating oysters is a complex and difficult task that might well suck the life out of one foolish enough to try to do so; 2) if the people from any place are up to the task of cultivating oysters, it is the Bretons."

See the entire review at www.thenewsoutherngentleman.wordpress... - link available at my Goodreads author page. Thanks for stopping by!

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This random book was picked up off the shelf at SW Welch based solely on the strength of its author photo. But what a photo! The book turned out to be amazing, charming and very imaginative for a non-fiction book. I think I would have liked this woman.
If you are curious at all about oysters, their lives, and the people who cultivate them, surely this must be the book to fit the bill!

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found myself drawn to the Oysters of Locmariaquer after recently reading Chesapeake Requiem, a portrait of Chesapeake watermen and their vanishing way of life. This well written volume which won the national book award In 1965 for Ellen Clark, wife of Robert Pen Warren, is a portrait of life in Brittany and a treatise of the life of oysters. The book was written decades ago and it left me wondering if I visited Brittany now, would this way of life be mostly gone?
The Breton way of life (and language) seems almost part of a different country in france. Her descriptions of various characters are both entertaining and telling. The history of oysters in the area goes back to roman times.Successes and failures due to early trial and error (and errors could be big when poisoned oysters killed diners) and later research, led to a certain prescribed seasonal routine. This book was well researched and well written.

[Rachel Shields Ebersole · Rating 4 out of 5]

So fascinating to read the breezy magazine style of writing from the 50s. There were plenty of times when I was lost in the complexities of the sentences and plenty of cultural allusions that I couldn't make heads or tails of -- and the historical digressions got a little tiresome in the middle -- but overall I found it delightful and informative. It's an interesting snapshot of a very specific place, and mostly of a very specific time, so I enjoyed the historical nature of both the subject matter and the reading experience. It wasn't a quick book to read, because I frequently had to go back and try again when untangling a sentence, and in some ways I felt like I was reading a language I'm not quiet fluent in, but if you're ok with the challenge and with not understanding 100% of it, this is absolutely worthwhile.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

So so tedious. I have been on an oyster kick since reading Shucked, and this one came up as a relates title so I dove right in. Really wish I hadn’t bothered. The majority of the book - which I wouldn’t have minded so much if it actually included oysters - was mainly disjointed ramblings of the locals and tidbits of history and stream of consciousness-esque writing. Was not a fan of her writing style at all.

[Nyna · Rating 3 out of 5]

More about Locmariaquer than about oysters. Delves into the current and past residents of the area, history, myths and a little bit of everything. The writing is charming, but it wanders here and there and back again. Feels disjointed. One learns a great deal about oysters but it feels like one doesn't really learn what one expected. I couldn't tell you what was left out about oysters, but it feels inadequate. It gets an extra star for the charm.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected this book would be about oysters and oyster farmers and their stories from Brittany. About 60% of the way through, the book was only about oyster and failed techniques for needing them it was beautifully written, but there was no story or narrative to carry me through any more of it. The writing is the only reason it gets two stars.

[Charlene S. Ring · Rating 4 out of 5]

For oyster lovers and word lovers

At times I became mired in the science of oyster culture, but Clark’s writing and her skill at embedding it in the life and time of Locmariaquer kept me reading until the very end. She has an intelligent and delightfully personal view of the world.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, the essay of the post mistress is classic. The post mistress is the custodian of the only publicly available telephone in the area. A fun comparison to today and the all consuming cell phone.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for the first time as a teenager 59 years ago, and it's even better now. Yes, it's about oysters but it's really about the way of life involved in producing Belon oysters in a corner of Brittany in northeast France. Excellent, excellent book, and fascinating throughout.

[Priscilla Pixler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I expected...kept trying to like it, but too many side stories. Ended up Skimming most of it.

[MBeach · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Barbara T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some beautiful stories about Brittany mixed in with the oysters

[Kimberly S · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5, what a SLOG

[Matthew]

DNF

[Cora P Bartemes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oysters, Oysters,Oysters.

This book is one that a professor of English Literature would assign to a graduate student just to prove the student’s ability to comprehend advanced literature was in doubt. The book is arduous and at the same time compelling. One has to love oysters to finish the book.

[Rusty · Rating 2 out of 5]

A blend of Breton history, mythology and of course the oyster industry.
I learn something new everyday.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sometimes humorous account of the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) and its cultivation in the Gulf of Morbihan at Locmariaquer in the Bretagne region of France. A charming combination of fact and myth regarding the Bretons, sealife, and megalithic monuments found there. The tasty Ostrea edulis, once plentiful along the coasts of Europe, was an early example of human-generated distruction through over-exploitation, pollution, habitat destruction, and the commercially-motivated introduction of competing species. Having grown up eating oysters my family had picked near the Dosiwalips River on the Hood Canal, I found the oyster information very interesting. Though this book was written forty years ago, it was very pertinent to our local oyster situation now: The nutrients from septic-tank runoff along the Canal is causing an overabundance of algae and the resulting oxygen depletion and dead zones in the Canal. But long before that the tastier, but smaller and slower growing Olympia Oyster (Ostrea conchaphila) had been largely displaced by the bigger and faster growing Pacific or Japanese oyster (Crassostrea gigas), which is probably the type we were picking back then. I learned of this book through a tribute to the author's birthday on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.