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Zusatztext For weeks after reading I found myself cornering people at parties to obliterate them with a machine-gun spray of eel facts . . . It is a charming and itch-scratching contribution to the eel canon — less an analysis of eels than a meditation on their glories . If you don’t think of yourself as someone who might enjoy meditating on eel glory, well, I didn’t either, and here I am transcribing my encounter for publication. Informationen zum Autor 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. 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. Klappentext 'What a joy! Patrick Svensson's sinuous weaving of natural history, philosophy, psychology and autobiography is as compelling and rewarding as a silver eel's return to the Sargasso Sea. I loved every moment.' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'Captivating . . . The Gospel of the Eels is, in the end, not really about eels but about life itself . . . Mr. Svensson mixes chapters about the eel's natural history - or, rather, the history of clumsy human attempts to understand it - with finely observed autobiographical vignettes devoted to his own childhood memories of eel-fishing with his father. From these memories, saturated with intense, sensory detail, Mr. Svensson's father emerges as a creature as magical and determined as any eel from the Sargasso Sea . . . Mr. Svensson's book is . . . full of stories and of a size just right, the size only memory and love can make: a place where secrets will always remain secrets and grief dissolves into the shimmering waters of the lake outside, the author's own Sargasso Sea, forever stocked with shiny eels, all within easy reach - yet not.' Wall Street Journal (USA) ' The Gospel of the Eels is the great fable of the identity age . . . It is about the identity of the eel, about globalization and about faith, and - though a small book - also about family and nature.' Die Welt (Germany) 'The author is brilliant at summarising one of the biggest riddles in marine biology, over which even Aristotle and Freud lost their sleep. Following eels and being surprised by their almost magical ability to slither out of the nets of science also means thinking about human knowledge and its limitations . . . A literary sensation.' La Stampa (Italy) Vorwort 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. Zusammenfassung Shortlisted for t he Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize 'This is one of those special books . . . Even if it were only a book about eels, it would be wonderful.' Sunday Times ‘What a joy! Patrick Svensson’s sinuous weaving of natural history, philosophy, psychology and autobiography is as compelling and rewarding as a silver eel’s return to the Sargasso Sea. I loved every moment.’ Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 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 ta...
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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
