The Oyster Diaries by Nancy LemannMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
"I didn't see him until ten years later. It was at a plantation in the Louisiana countryside called Perseverance. A branch of his family had lived there since the Civil War and farmed the land. Sugarcane was doomed but they had more luck with soybeans. They had names like Po-boy and Peanut and took their vacations at a summer house in the next town one mile away.
To get there you went through the swamps outside of New Orleans towards Baton Route and took the ferry at Gramercy across the Mississippi river, then followed the levee the rest of the way. It was pretty much at the ends of the earth.
And there was the blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile and the sublime hell in his soul. And was I myself toddling about at the beginning of lie, among the ghosts in their now remote nether realm. "They must have let the angels out of heaven," he said when he saw me. "
"In Venice with my father when Grace was twelve he took us to approximately one zillion churches to look at the Carpaccios. He pointed out the red bird in the corner of a Carpaccio he said had led him to have an epiphany in 1958. Every day his secretary FedEx-ed him hard copies of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which he read on the boats while gliding past the palazzos with their marble angels, the ornate architecture everywhere, sometimes opera playing, on the green canals. We had oysters on an ancient court with Moorish arches and white umbrellas under awnings crisply flapping in the wind. Opera, oysters, the world."
"The next day a certain evidence of fall was in the air--the Southern fall--a hot fall, amid the oaks, the kind that in childhood when you went home from school with a friend, their mother would be sitting at the kitchen counter wearing a black lace slip and drinking vodka, staring out at the velvet green lawns."
Aren't three quotes enough to want to read this book about New Orleans, unique characters, heat, romance, travel, and mostly families? I loved this book and its meandering observations and people.
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