A beautiful book about the bivalves of Brittany and the people who cultivate them. ( )

Brilliantly written -- wit, charm, grace, woven stories into observation -- into the mysteries of the zoological and historical depths of the oyster industry in Brittany.

These oysters, which start their lives in the Gulf of Morbihan, off the Bay of Biscay on the northwest coast of France, are called Armoricaines (from the ancient name of Brittany) Belons (if they are raised, though not born, at the mouth of the Belon River in Finistère), or just les plates, the flat ones. They are Ostrea edulis rather than the more common European oyster called Portuguese, Crassostrea angulata. They start life as “spat”—although Clark dislikes that word and uses it only once in the book—attached to one of some tens of millions of white tiles distributed in the summer spawning season along the mouth of the gulf.
Eleanor Clark, who was the wife of Robert Penn Warren, won the National Book Award for The Oysters of Locmariaquer in 1965. She intersperses sections on natural history, on the geography and economics of the oyster fishery—really hatchery—with portraits of locals. The opening contains a map of the west coast of France and a detailed map of the Bay of Quiberon, Locmariaquer, and the Gulf of Morbihan.
Clark puts herself in the book, unobtrusively, in a funny section that begins with a description of the local postmistress, also the guardian of the public phone at the Post Office, who helps the author in her attempt to find books on oysters, which she has heard may be found at the Society of Many Learnings in Vannes (they have one book on oysters there).
The crisis of overfishing of the once phenomenally plentiful oyster began in the 18th century and has lasted into the 20th. Clark says the Brittany oyster fishery would have disappeared but for the ichthyologist V. Coste (1807-73), who did work on the oyster’s reproduction and experimented with methods of increasing the oyster fishery.
What was necessary was “a technique of breeding, meaning, in this context, collecting larvae and raising seed.” Since Aristotle, it had been known that oysters attached themselves to potshards and that they could be fattened in places where they would not breed. In 1st-century B. C. Sergius Orata was maturing oysters in oyster parks in Lake Lucrinus in the Gulf of Baia.
Coste, whose first name was Jean-Jacques-Marie-Cyprien-Victor, was one of the first to note that the oyster is a hermaphrodite, but not until the 1870s was the cyclical sex change from year to year or oftener known. The eggs (a million for O. edulis; many more for other types) are discharged after being kept (the “milky” stage) for a week or two after fertilization. The larvae swim free for a week or two and then must attach themselves to a substrate, preferring clean and lime surfaces.
Coste got government grants to experiment with various substrates and techniques, but it was also local oystermen at Auray and elsewhere who helped make progress. First came the convex, 33-centimeter long tile, then a method for grouping and suspending the tiles. The discovery that when the oyster’s milk turned blue was the moment for placing the tiles was followed by experiments showing that the following February to April was the time for removing the oysters, which were then enclosed in wire boxes (caisses) and eventually set out in 60-yard-square parks with low wire fences to protect them from crabs and starfish. Persistent efforts had to continue to root out the drilling snail and the starfish, the banes of the east coast U. S. oyster fishery.
Clark interposes a chapter (six) that starts with the young priest of the region and a recent death, ranges through the saints from Brittany, the Arthurian legends the area shares with other Celtic lands, and ends with the young priest again and a reference to the Fisher King legend.
The next-to-last chapter (seven) details the placing of the bouquets or groups of tiles between high tides in June when fertilization has occurred and the discharge is about to happen. The tiles have been scraped, tied together in bouquets, and dipped in lime. The seven or eight pound bouquets will be placed on the pickets by women and handed overboard from barges to the men placing them in the vase or slime bottom.
Clark weaves this account with a view of the people, including Mme. T., who with her husband the philanderer owns the local restaurant. Many years previously he impregnated Françoise, the crippled and wall-eyed servant. Françoise’s daughter Marie-Yvette was a beautiful girl and her mother’s prize until she killed herself at eighteen after being beaten and verbally abused by Mme. T. at the restaurant. Yann, who is Monsieur T’s foreman, remembers the episode and his mother’s insistence that they tell no one. Yann’s sister Yvette is married to a drunkard and wife-beater who sober sup long enough to participate in the placing of the tiles.
In the last chapter Clark tells of Françoise’s hundred-year-old mother’s death during the terrible winter of 1962-3, when the whole oyster crop was lost at Locmariaquer. ( )