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    The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
    The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
    The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

    Written by Patrik Svensson

    Narrated by Alex Wyndham

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition.

    Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even today, in an age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery.

    Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. In The Book of Eels, we meet renowned historical thinkers, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to Rachel Carson, for whom the eel was a singular obsession. And we meet the scientists who spearheaded the search for the eel’s point of origin, including Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt, who led research efforts in the early twentieth century, catching thousands upon thousands of eels, in the hopes of proving their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea.

    Blending memoir and nature writing at its best, Svensson’s journey to understand the eel becomes an exploration of the human condition that delves into overarching issues about our roots and destiny, both as humans and as animals, and, ultimately, how to handle the biggest question of all: death. The result is a gripping and slippery narrative that will surprise and enchant.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 26, 2020
    ISBN9780062968845
    Author

    Patrik Svensson

    Patrik Svensson is an arts and culture journalist at Sydsvenskan newspaper. He lives with his family in Malmö, Sweden. The Gospel of Eels is his first book.

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    Reviews for The Book of Eels

    4/5

    242 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      An absolute banger that keeps my ever-shortening attention span focused while inspiring thoughts from my last two brain cells. Excellent narration, and the translation leaves no confusion. The book jumps around quite a bit. It's not all eels all the time, but the tangents the author goes off on draw prescient comparisons to the main subject. Will keep looking out for this author and narrator.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Not about eels. Mostly an autobiography. Eels are fascinating but this guy's life isnt.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was a surprisingly touching book, in addition to being informative. I loved it!
    • 4/5
      this was??? strange, but satisfying.

      it was my bad for not fully understanding it was part memoir, part conversation about eels. i learned a lot, but it didn't spark any big joy. a lot of the stuff about his father didn't hit me until closer to the end of the book, which made the whole thing feel more jumbled but gave it more heart.
    • 4/5
      Very nicely done I previously knew nothing about eels. Narrator does well, also
    • 5/5
      Simply beautiful. A well written history of eels and humans co-existing for centuries, told along anecdotes of famous explorers and scientists, philosophers and hunters. There's something for every reader in here, be it the story of Svensson's own family or maybe how Sigmund Freud failed to describe the reproductions of eels. I still don't particularly "like" eels, but now I know a lot about them.
    • 5/5
      Excellent, interesting, and easy to listen to. I love the intertwining of science and history with story.
    • 5/5
      This book is sweet and sensitive. It weaves facts about eels, climate change and humanity's impact on another species of life with personal and philosophical reflections. Surprising and delightful read.
    • 4/5
      What an unexpected surprise! This combination of memoir, science, and history examines what we know and still do not know about the eel. They are born in the Sargasso Sea, travel thousands of miles upstream to lakes where the spend a portion of their lives, then migrate back. No one knows how they reproduce. No one has seen a mature adult in the Sargasso Sea. They have been studied since Aristotle’s time.

      Svensson has been around eels since his childhood years in Sweden, where his father taught him eel fishing. He cites eels in literature, scientific studies, and Basque traditions. He weaves together chapters of nature writing and personal stories. I particularly enjoyed the touching scenes with his father toward the end.

      The author has a point of view and is not shy in expressing his opinions. It is a nice change of pace. I tend to enjoy books about creatures of our natural world with secrets we have not yet discovered. If you enjoy great nature writing and scientific mysteries, this is a good one to pick up.

      4.5
    • 4/5
      Who knew that eels were so fascinating?!There is a lot about the life cycle of eels that scientists still don't know. They are strange and fascinating animals. Svensson talks about what we do know about eels, and the history of how we learned what we know, including the journeys of one scientist who spent 20 years roaming the oceans looking for eel breeding grounds. Interspersed with this natural history is Svensson's memoir, focusing on his relationship with his dad and how he and his dad went eel-fishing and bonded over their fascination with the animals. Svensson also explores the role of eels in the economy, in cooking, and in literature.At the heart of this book is mystery: eels are very mysterious and have baffled scientists forever, and that's what makes them so interesting.
    • 5/5
      This was lovely and very compelling. It was a truly great balance between the memoir of a man and his dad fishing for eels, alongside the barely known story of those same eels. It’s utterly fascinating that so little is known to this day, and I kind of love that there are “world’s foremost eel experts” out there still trying to learn more.
    • 4/5
      An unusual, and very charming interdisciplinary look at eels, our relationship with them as objects of culinary, scientific, ecological, religious, literary, historical and philosophical interest, interleaved with the more personal story of the role of eel-related father-son bonding moments in the author's own life, and at what that tells us about recent Swedish social history. At the centre of the story is the way that eels are in one sense quite familiar, everyday creatures — we may only rarely see them but we know they are around, or at least we think we do — and in another sense deeply mysterious, living important parts of their lives in ways that science has had great difficulties studying. We know, for instance, that eel larvae appear to migrate across the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, and that sexually mature eels have been seen heading towards it, so it seems to follow that that's where eels breed, but despite many attempts, no-one has actually seen any sign of them doing it (the Japanese eel is slightly less coy than its Atlantic cousins, apparently). It almost seems too good to be true that Sigmund Freud had his first scientific job attempting to find an eel with male sex organs, in a marine science lab in Trieste. Svensson looks at this, and many other wonderful anecdotes from the history of great scientists struggling with "the eel question". And at eels in literature, with starring roles for Graham Swift and Günter Grass, as we would expect (but no mention of Arthur Ransome, sadly). There's a little bit about eels in various religions and popular beliefs, although this doesn't go quite as deep as the more zoological parts of the book. And quite a lot, as we would expect, about how eels now seem to be under threat from human activity, and how their obscure life-cycle complicates things (species are counted by numbers of breeding adults, but for the eel that's exactly the thing we know least about!).The personal story of Svensson's relationship with his working-class father, as expressed through their night-time eel-fishing expeditions together, alternates with these more general sections of the book. And they are, like most fishing stories, much more about the fishermen than about the fish (or indeed the fishing). Quite moving at times, but also often touching and funny. An interesting and lively book, even if ichthyology isn't your thing.
    • 4/5
      All the facts about eels are interesting, but the thoughts about man's relationship with nature and the mysterious is even more so. Who knew eels were such fascinating creatures with habits that scientists have yet to figure out. The author writes about that, but so much more including his relationship with his father and his relationship with God or the "mysterious."I heard the author interviewed and it sounded so interesting; I wasn't disappointed. Only gave 3.5 stars just because I save my high rations for books that are really my favorites. This deserves 5 stars for the ingenuity of writing.
    • 5/5
      I live in New Zealand where eels hold a special place in Maori culture. I am not Maori or of Maori descent, I am an immigrant in this beautiful land. Whilst driving almost anywhere in NZ when one comes across new roads with cuttings and embankments, any concrete is often adorned with relief work of eels.

      A while back I lived in a remote/weird settlement in an area surrounded by lakes, rivers and what are referred to as drainage ditches. In every lake or waterway in NZ there are eels. That particular place was an eel migration point from the local lake. The eels would gather round the seaward side of the lake until we had a huge southerly storm when the shingle bank would be wet, then the eels would slither out of the lake and over the shingle into the sea then off to who knew where to breed and die.

      For a while I used to catch a few eels for food. I did that until I found out that the eels were anywhere from upwards of 45 years old. At that point I stopped because I felt that having lived so long who was I to take their life when I could easily get food anywhere, this was not a life or death struggle. I have seen eels here that were between 80 and 100 years old. People I have met who climb mountais tell me that wherever you find running water, no matter how high up there will be eels there.

      In the Northern Hemisphere, the fantasy is that the eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea to breed and die. Even though the Sargasso Sea has no borders apart from 4 ocean currents and is a "sea within a sea", a gyre if you will, and not one single human being has ever seen a single eel in the Sargasso Sea.

      The simple truth is that we know nothing of these creatures. I have seen that most people have a visceral reaction to them if seen up close. I also know that eel blood is a neurotoxin to humans. They seem to occupy a place nearer to our subconscious than our conscious selves.

      Personally, they remind me that we are just trouble and if the virus were to kill every single one of us the eels would just carry on as before, they would shed no tears over us and sometimes I wonder if they even know we are here.

      I loved this book because it takes us to their territory, which is really a very undefined place, and not them to us.

      Throughout human history they have been an enigma, it's as if on a "need to know" basis we are not on the list of those that need to know.
    • 5/5
      Just outstanding!!