'Eels': James Prosek's natural history of a slippery, fascinating creature

'Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish'

by James Prosek

Harper, 287 pp., $25.99

Mysterious, curious and slimy, eels are like no other fish. They can cross over land from one body of water to the next. They can ascend vertical walls by forming a braid. They can grow to 6 feet long and live for up to a century. Born in the ocean, they spend most of the rest of their lives in freshwater, and then return, hundreds of miles, to their point of birth. (Where, exactly, the different species of freshwater eel spawn is so baffling that no one had ever captured an adult eel at sea, at least in the Atlantic Ocean, until 2008.)

In his latest book, "Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish," James Prosek sets out to explore the life of an animal that he calls "timeless and vital, a metaphor for the resilience of life itself." He is an ideal guide to this world. Prosek has written extensively and passionately about fish, particularly trout, and his knowledge and abiding interest permeate the book.

"Eels," not a natural-history book of facts and figures, instead is about the people whose lives are intertwined with eels. Wherever the animals range, in the South Pacific, in New Zealand, in Japan, in New England, eels are essential to people's survival, not just as food, but as guardian, spirit, monster slayer and totem.

Through all of his tales, scientific and cultural, Prosek slowly pieces together the fish's mystery and importance. In the end, we are left with many questions about what Prosek observes and hears but this is what he wants. He writes "We allow ourselves to believe that nature can be explained. ... The eels, through their simplicity of form, their preference for darkness, and their grace of movement in the opposite direction of every other fish, have helped me to see things for which there is no easy classification, things that can't be quantified or solved, and get to the essence of experience."