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

that had taken place since the Renaissance, but the eel was now for the most part understood. No longer limited to simply pointing to its undeniable existence, we were in a position to discuss the features of that existence. We knew not only that the eel is, we also knew some of what the eel is. We no longer had to rely solely on faith.

And yet the eel continued to be associated with the irrational psyche of humankind, with the alien and unfathomable, in both literature and art. It remained a slimy, frightening creature of the dark, slithering out of the depths. A creature unlike others.

In Fritiof Nilsson Piraten’s Swedish classic Bombi Bitt and Me, from 1932, the eel is a devil, a horned monster that has grown to more than ten feet long over the course of countless years in the depths. In a remote and possibly bottomless Scanian pond, it has hidden away from humanity, until the book’s main characters, Eli and Bombi Bitt, along with old man Vricklund, set out to catch it one night. Vricklund manages to pull it out of the pond; it’s a “dark, monstrous creature, that whipped the water to foam”—and then a wild wrestling match ensues. The eel rises up like a “living telephone pole”; the moonlight outlines its large horns; the struggle ends only when Vricklund sinks his teeth into its enormous body.

“I bit that bastard to death,” Vricklund declares, blood still dripping from his mouth. But it’s a temporary victory. The eel is resurrected. It comes back to life with a heavy sigh, slithers away through the grass, and disappears into the underworld through a hole in the ground. Back to the place it evidently came from, the shadows, the subconscious, the lowest, darkest circles of the soul.

In Boris Vian’s surrealist love story The Foam of Days, from 1947, the eel is an absurd creature that foreshadows impending tragedy. It emerges from the kitchen faucet at the very start of the story. Every day, it pokes its head out of the tap, looks around, and vanishes again. Until, that is, a crafty cook one day places a pineapple on the kitchen counter, and the eel, unable to resist, sinks its teeth into it. The cook makes a delicious eel pâté, which the protagonist, Colin, eats, thinking of his love, Chloé, whom he has just met and is set to marry, but who will soon fall gravely ill. A water lily is growing inside her chest, an aquatic plant from the world of the eel. It grows like an aggressive tumor, killing her and leaving Colin heartbroken and alone.

The eel’s greatest performance, at least in literature, however, is in the 1983 novel Waterland by the English author Graham Swift. It tells the story of Tom Crick, a history teacher who tries to capture the imaginations of his bored and scientifically minded students with stories about himself and his childhood. He examines his own unreliable memory, trying to understand why things ended up the way they did. His marriage to Mary and their childlessness. Her nascent insanity. Where did it all start? Maybe with the live eel another boy stuck down her pants when she was a child?

Or with his brother Dick, who also wooed Mary when they were young and who won a swimming competition just to impress her? Like an eel on its way to the Sargasso Sea, he swam farther than anyone else in order to reach his goal—the goal that is also the goal of existence. But why did he? And what does it really mean?

The story is vague and unreliable. Who really knows what the truth is? But the eel is ever present. From start to end. It slithers through the entire story like a constant reminder of everything that is hidden or forgotten.

And toward the end, Tom Crick tells his students about the eel itself. About the eel question and its scientific history, with all its guesswork and mysteries and misunderstandings. About Aristotle and the theory of the eel springing from mud. About Linnaeus, who thought the eel was self-propagating. About the famous Comacchio eel, about Mondini’s discovery and Spallanzani’s questioning of it. About Johannes Schmidt and his dogged search for the eel’s birthplace. About the curiosity that drove them all. This is what the eel can teach us, Tom Crick argues. It tells us something about the curiosity of humankind, about our unquenchable need to seek the truth and understand where everything comes from and what it means. But also about our need for mystery. “Now there is much the eel can tell us about curiosity—rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel.”

BUT WHY IS THE EEL CONSIDERED SO UNPLEASANT? WHY DOES IT arouse those kinds of feelings in us? Surely it’s not simply because it’s slippery and slimy, or because of what it eats, or because it likes the dark? Nor can it be based solely on religious misinterpretations. No, it’s probably also because it’s secretive, because there seems to be something hidden behind its apparently lifeless black eyes. On the one hand, we’ve seen it, touched it, tasted it. On the other hand, it’s keeping something from us. Even when we get really close to it, it somehow remains a stranger.

In psychology, and in art, there’s a particular kind of unpleasantness referred to as uncanniness. The German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch wrote an article in 1906 entitled “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” in which he defines the concept of the unheimlich, the uncanny, as “the dark sense of insecurity” we are overcome with when we encounter something new and strange. What frightens us, Jentsch explains, what’s uncanny, is that which makes us intellectually unsure, what lack of experience or the limitations of our senses prevents us from immediately recognizing and explaining.

This was too glib an analysis for Sigmund Freud, who by that time had abandoned his eel studies and become the star of psychoanalysis. In 1919, he published the essay “Das Unheimliche,”