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

This is a book that I found truly moving and somehow applicable to everything while at the same time transporting me to another place. Patrik Svensson’s wonderfully written book made a huge impact. I originally bought it to give to a young man fascinated by eels and began reading it out of curiosity. I could not put it down. For me, it is a mystery, a philosophical treatise, a heartwarming story of life, death, relationships, science, romance, god, faith, history, geography, and much more. It is also a metaphor for illness, health, prejudice – all the things we’re grappling with today. There’s even a chapter on Freud’s time in Trieste.

Mostly it is a reflection on the fleeting magic of life. I think it would be a good book to read out loud – a family might take turns.
Jane Hall, psychoanalyst

An easy but worthwhile read about a mysterious creature that is to be treasured rather than shunned. The life cycle of both the American and European eel is nothing short of miraculous and the author expertly weaves science and memoir into an unforgettable journey that is both fascinating and deeply satisfying. Highly recommended.

In The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson enlists Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, and Rachel Carson to help tell a son/father story wrapped in a resistant mystery.

Eels have an ancient, amply recorded history in diets and commerce, leaving their shadows in literature and mythology. Much is known about their unusual life cycle. Yet when it comes to the beginning and the end of that cycle, science seems to have embraced the rules of horseshoes and hand grenades where close enough will do for now. No one has ever witnessed the birth of an eel.

Patrik Svensson and his father become beneficiaries of the eel enigma.

The father worked as a road paver all his life. What he loved, however, was the stream and adjoining land where he grew up. For him, eel catching was less than an obsession but more than a diversion. Most important, it was a chance to be with his son.

In turn, the author combines life with his father and the life of the eel into a narrative illuminating both stories. The writing is very fine. Chapter Ten, just four pages long, describes a particularly bizarre way to catch eels and all by itself justifies buying the book.

Svensson sews together the books start and finish with a pair of numbers. An eel in captivity, he writes at the outset, can live eighty years. At the end of the book, the authors father dies at sixty. Both lives one surprisingly long, one sadly too short leave behind an ache for more.

Reading this book is like a vacation. It takes you far away and leaves you rested and refreshed. Its charming and thought provoking.

Eels are not something one thinks about unless you eat them on the regular. I don’t, but I love to eat them, even though as a teen, I often caught them, then discarded them outside of water without eating them. The frightened me because they seemed like snakes. As an adult, I ate them because they were “unagi” a delicious Japanese preparation that came in sushi. This book makes it clear, eels are mysterious creatures, as slippery to science as they are in real life. Aristotle observed them and wrote about them, but did not solve the mystery of their lives. They seem to exist outside our time, in their own time, which is not linear. No one has witnessed eels spawning or found any in the Sargasso Sea where they are supposed to go at the end of their lives. Weird animals. This book is also dreamlike in the authors thoughts as he goes through his life with his dad as they went fishing for them. Lovely book.

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