Tom Fort
Eeler’s Choice
Moonlighting: Tales and Misadventures of a Working Life with Eels
By Michael Brown
Merlin Unwin Books 255pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
In Germany the freshwater eel, Anguilla anguilla, is regarded with reverence. The Germans love it smoked – ‘eating them with their fingers like sweet corn, the juice running down their chins,’ as Michael Brown describes it in his thoroughly engaging eel-catching memoir.
The eel’s undeniable drawback is its looks. But what it lacks in glamour it makes up for – many times over, in my partisan view – with the mystery and wonder of its habits and its excellence as food. Some years ago I wrote my own celebration of it, called
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf