An eel that successfully avoids illness and calamity can live for up to fifty years in one place. (Location 79)
Myths and legends tell of eels living to a hundred or more. (Location 80)
It has been shown that a silver eel in captivity can live for up to four years without any nourishment at all. (Location 93)
About the Author
PATRIK SVENSSON is an arts and culture journalist for the Sydsvenskan newspaper. He lives with his family in Malmö, Sweden. The Book of Eels is his first book. (Location 2812)
No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one has seen an eel fertilize the eggs of another eel; no one has managed to breed European eels in captivity. (Location 289)
Metaphysics is not necessarily concerned with God. It is, rather, an attempt to describe the true nature of things, the whole of reality. It claims there’s a difference between existence per se and the characteristics of that existence. It also claims the two questions are separate. The eel is. Existence comes first. But what it is, is a completely different matter. (Location 299)
What neither Freud nor Jacoby knew was, of course, that eels have no visible sex organs until they need them. Its metamorphoses are not just superficial adaptations to new life conditions. They’re existential. An eel becomes what it needs to be when the time is right. (Location 593)
The eels’ mystique becomes an echo of the questions all people carry within them: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? (Location 831)