Book of Eels - Patrik Svensson
My first thoughts about the book are pulled in two directions. First, the book is so Nordic. I don’t know much about Nordic culture but I’m pretty sure there is a tendency for pragmatism and borderline pessimism. I certainly saw elements of this tone. I didn’t feel pushed away by it — rather I really connected with it. Throughout the book, Svensson uses the mysterious eel as a symbol for the still-unanswered parts of our existence. Svensson doesn’t sugar-coat his existential worries. Empirical evidence to support traditional religions are slim and Svensson sees no reason, at this point in our collective human knowledge, to think otherwise. You get the feeling that his overall worldview would be settled, yet — like a bit of food stuck in his jaw — he can’t seem to get the strange existence of the mysterious eel out of his mind…
This brings me to the other direction my mind is pulled when I think about “Book of Eels.” Eels are incredibly strange and, apparently, people have been perplexed by them for centuries. I just want to talk about them with people. After learning about them, its like I joined a little club that knows their weirdness and I just want to invite people in to be perplexed by the eel together! All Eels come from the same place on the globe — the Sargasso Sea. They are born there, then they scatter throughout the earth for their lifetime. At the end of their lives, they go back to the Saragasso Sea and die. The fact that they all start in this one region and somehow find their way back there after scattering throughout the world is weird enough. But the real mysterious stuff lies in the time between. The biological changes that they go through don’t really seem to be dictated by the passage of time. There are four main stages of their life but an eel in one set of conditions could stay in the third stage for 80% of its life and then quickly go into the fourth stage, where it finally reproduces, and then just quickly die. Or it could go into that final stage much more quickly in its life, reproduce, and stay alive for many more years. Speaking of reproducing, no one has ever actually seen an eel reproduce in person. Never! They’ve had them in captivity but then the eels never do anything. Whatever it is that compels them to do so in the wild just isn’t there when they are in a clinical setting. There is a story of an eel that was caught and put at the bottom of a well and stayed down there for decades. It managed to stay down there with no light or sustenance but it was able to adapt itself to be able to survive. The time wasn’t the factor effecting its existence, it was the situation.
Ultimately, these topics seem like they shouldn’t be able to meld into one cohesive story, but Svensson manages to do it beautifully. For Svensson, the absurdity and mystery of the eel acts as a glimmer of the wonder that can still be found in this world. It’s 2020 and it seems like I can just go to the internet and search the most minute fact about any species on the earth. But not the eel. The eel still requires us to suspend our human authority and, at least for now, just accept that there are still things we still can’t explain yet.