The Gospel of the Eels: A Father, a Son and the World's Most Enigmatic Fish

ISBN-13: 9781529030693 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 256 str.

Patrik Svensson

Opis

The 'Book of the Fair' of the 2019 London Book Fair, with rights sold in over 30 languages, a memoir of fishing for eels, a close yet distant father-son relationship and a riveting journey into the story of the world's most mysterious fish.

'I can't recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. Actually, I can't remember us speaking at all. Maybe because we never did.'The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even today. What we do know is that it's born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the coasts of Europe - a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It lives a solitary life, hiding from both light and science, for ten, twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn, morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.And yet . . . There is still so much we don't know about eels. No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the eel's metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And now the eel is disappearing, and we don't know exactly why.What we do know is that eels and their mysterious lives captivate us.This is the basis for The Gospel of the Eels, Patrik Svensson's quite unique natural science memoir; his ongoing fascination with this secretive fish, but also the equally perplexing and often murky relationship he shared with his father, whose only passion in life was fishing for this obscure creature.Through the exploration of eels in literature (Günter Grass and Graham Swift feature, amongst others) and the history of science (we learn about Aristotle's and Sigmund Freud's complicated relationships with eels) as well as modern marine biology (Rachel Carson and others) we get to know this peculiar animal. In this exploration, we also learn about the human condition, life and death, through natural science and nature writing at its very best.As Patrik Svensson concludes: 'by writing about eels, I have in some ways found my way home again.'

Recenzje

Svensson's prose surges, eel-like, from languid to wriggling up your arm . . . There is a stillness to Svensson's writing that perfectly suits [both] the eel and his enigmatic father . . . This is a book about tenderness, slime and savagery . . . The power of the [father-son] relationships is in the unsaid. Daily Telegraph

O autorze

Svensson, Patrik Patrik Svensson (b. 1972) is an arts and culture journalist at Sydsvenskan newspaper. He lives with his family in Malmö in southern Sweden. The Gospel of the Eels is his first book. Broomé, Agnes Agnes Broomé is a literary translator and Preceptor in Scandinavian at Harvard University. With a PhD in Translation Studies, her translations include August Prize winners The Expedition by Bea Uusma and The Gospel of Eels by Patrik Svensson.