The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

AS IT MAY, THE EEL REMAINED DETESTABLE, IF NOT TO ALL then to many, and if not as a food or a cultural heritage, then at least as a metaphor. Even beyond fallacies and religious misunderstandings, it has, at times, come to represent the unwelcome. Whatever is strange and unpleasant to us. What may have to be allowed to exist, out of view, but which should not be allowed to reach the surface too often.

In one of the twentieth century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach, pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming waves comes a horse’s head. It’s black and shiny and lies there at the water’s edge, its dead eyes staring while greenish eels slither from every orifice. The eels crawl out, shiny and entrails-like, more than two dozen of them; when the man has shoved them all into a potato sack, he pries open the horse’s grinning mouth, sticks his hands into its throat, and pulls out two more eels, as thick as his own arms.

This macabre fishing method is described in Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum. Rarely has the eel been more detestable.

The eel does not appear frequently in literature or art, but when it does, it’s often an unsettling, slightly revolting creature. It’s slimy and slithering, oily and slippery, a scavenger of the dark that salaciously crawls out of cadavers with gaping mouth and beady black eyes.

Sometimes, however, it’s more than that. In The Tin Drum, the eel actually plays a rather important role. It both foreshadows and triggers tragedy.

The people standing on that Baltic beach, watching the man pull the horse’s head from the sea, are the novel’s main characters, the boy Oskar Matzerath; his father, Alfred; his mother, Agnes; and her cousin and lover, Jan Bronski. Agnes is pregnant but hasn’t told anyone. We don’t know who the father is, Alfred or Jan, nor do we know if Alfred is really Oskar’s father. Agnes is depressed and self-destructive and seems to view the life growing within her more as a devouring tumor than a gift. What’s happening inside her is a mystery, to both her family and the reader.

The four of them have gone for a walk along the beach when they come across the eel fisherman. Agnes curiously asks what he’s doing, but he makes no reply. He just grins, flashing filthy teeth, and continues to tug on the rope. Once the horse’s head is out of the water and Agnes sees the eels crawling out of its skull, something happens to her. She’s revolted by them both physically and psychologically. She has to lean against her lover, Jan, to keep from swooning. The seagulls swarm above them, flying in ever-tighter circles, screeching like sirens; when the grinning man pulls the two fattest eels out of the horse’s throat, Agnes turns and vomits. It’s as though she’s trying to expel both her acute nausea and the unwanted fetus in her belly. As though one is inextricably linked to the other. She never fully recovers from the experience.

Jan eventually leads Agnes away down the beach; Oskar and Alfred stay behind, watching the man pull the last enormous eel, sticky with white, porridge-like brain substance, out of the horse’s ear. Eels don’t just eat horses’ heads, they eat human bodies, too, the man explains, and tells them the eels grew especially plump after the Battle of Skagerak during the First World War. Oskar stares, mesmerized, his white tin drum slung around his neck and resting on his belly. Alfred is thrilled and promptly buys four eels from the man, two large and two medium ones.

The event on the beach changes Agnes. The sight of the slithering eels and the grotesque horse’s head awakens something in her. She grows increasingly ill and tries to manage her condition with food. She eats constantly, binging and vomiting by turns. What she eats is fish, and eel in particular. She devours fatty pieces of eel swimming in cream sauce, and when her husband refuses to serve her more fish, she goes to the fishmonger and returns with an armful of smoked eels. She scrapes the skin clean of fat with a knife and licks it, then vomits once more. When her husband, Alfred, nervously asks if she is pregnant, she only snorts with derision and serves herself another piece of eel.

Agnes dies shortly after. Its unclear if she eats herself to death, or if perhaps her heart has broken. At her funeral, her son, Oskar, studies her in the open casket. Her face is haggard and slightly jaundiced. He pictures her suddenly sitting up and vomiting once more, imagines there’s still something inside her that has to come out, not just an unwanted child but also that alien and detestable thing that in such a short time devoured and killed her. Which is to say, the eel.

“From eel to eel,” Oskar thinks, standing by the coffin, “for eel thou art, to eel returnest.”

And when his dead mother doesn’t sit up and vomit, he experiences relief and closure. “She kept it down and it was evidently her intention to take it with her into the ground, that at last there might be peace.”

It’s a devastating metaphor. The eel as death incarnate. Or rather, not just death but also death’s opposite. The eel as a kind of symbolic link between beginning and end, between the origin of life and its demise. Ashes to ashes, eel to eel.

IN THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, WHEN THE TIN DRUM WAS FIRST published, science had teased out most of the eel’s secrets. It had been demystified and rendered comprehensible. Humanity had slowly but surely homed in on the answer to the eel question. Its origin had been found and its method of reproduction established. Progress had been slow, like a snail next to the bullet train of scientific advancement