"The gospel of the eels": how a Swedish essay became a world bestseller

A world bestseller has just been translated and published in France:

, written by the Swede Patrik Svensson, winner of the August Prize, the Swedish equivalent of our Goncourt.

But how did this essay on ecological threats to eels rank among the world's best sellers? 

This is a first book for its author Patrik Svensson, a 48-year-old journalist, who was the first to be amazed at its success.

It opens into the Sargasso Sea, where eels are born, a fish still very little known to scientists.

We learn a lot about its reproduction and its fishing. 

>> Find the morning show of the day in replay and podcast here

An animal "which for centuries has eluded scientific knowledge"

But why has such a book sold several hundred thousand copies around the world?

Perhaps because this freshwater snake remains a mystery precisely.

"There is a part of fascination for this animal, which we believe we know but which we discover, with this book, that it has escaped scientific knowledge for centuries", explains to Europe 1 Pierre Demarty, the publisher of the book, at the Threshold.

"It is a book which establishes a bridge between the ecological questions which are ours and the great metaphysical questions on our origins and our destiny", he adds.

Patrick Svensson also tells us the story of eels over 2,000 years, Aristotle thought that they were born from the mud, Freud dissected by the hundreds to unravel their mystery, but Svensson also mixes in it memories of fishing with his father and succeeds in linking the intimate to the universal, through a fluid and flexible writing… like an eel.