When it comes to the eel, we can allow ourselves to ask banal questions, simply because the banal questions don't always have immediate answers. We can also allow ourselves to welcome this. We should be glad that knowledge has its limits. This response isn't just a defense mechanism; it's also a way for us to understand the fact that the world is an incomprehensible place. There is something compelling about the mysterious.
The European eel is one of the most mysterious, yet familiar, creatures in the world. For hundreds or thousands of years, it's been a staple of European cuisine and culture, a staple of coastal lifestyles from Spain--where the juvenile "glass eels" are considered a delicacy--to the Sweden of author Patrik Svensson's childhood home. And yet little is known about the eel, a creature that no one has ever seen mate. For centuries, the "eel question" dominated discourse among natural scientists. Some claimed the eel must be hermaphroditic, reproducing asexually, or even appearing naturally from the mud, since its sexual organs could not be found. The 18th century discovery, at long last, that eels grow sexual organs only when it's time to reproduce was an Einstein-level bombshell among biologists.
The Book of Eels is, at least partially, a history of "the eel question," and the dedicated naturalists who pursued it. Svensson details the life of Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt, who doggedly trawled the Atlantic measuring the size of willow leaf-shaped eel larvae, looking for the smallest, and who determined that eels must reproduce in the Sargasso Sea, the placid sea-within-a-sea that rests between the various ocean currents. He describes others who turned their attention to the "eel question," like a young Sigmund Freud, whose frustrated attempts to discover the reproductive patterns of eels may have helped turn his attention toward psychology, and Rachel Carson, whose description of the life of the American eel was an integral part of her advocacy for the world's oceans. And yet, The Book of Eels shows, the "eel question" has never been satisfactorily resolved. There are those who believe, because we have never seen them mate in the Sargasso Sea--or even found a sexually mature eel there!--the assumption that they breed there must be mistaken. To consider the eel question on the precipice of the 21st century is to consider the limits of our own knowledge and the persistence of mystery.
Svensson intersperses with these natural histories a loving and wistful description of his own relationship with his father, with whom he used to fish for eels in the rivers of his native Sweden. The mystery of the eel, touched by the ordinary fisherman, stands in for other, more personal mysteries, like the one that lies at the heart of the father-son relationship, and the inevitability of loss. In this way The Book of Eels reminded me of Helen Macdonald's wonderful and touching H is for Hawk. It's to Svensson's credit that the transitions from the natural history sections to the personal reflections, which might have seem forced or silly, never do. Among other things, The Book of Eels is skillfully written, deft and nimble, but never overly sentimental or tendentious. Its power comes from the simple and familiar nature of its subject, a common--and not very attractive--fish, that nevertheless evokes a deep wonder.
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