Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “The Eel” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

The Eel

David J. MacKinnon (Goodreads Author)

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 8 ratings · 4 reviews

Jack Fingon devises a plan to steal the remains of a dead poet from a clique of heirs living in squalor on the coast of Brittany. He plans to scatter the remains over the Sargasso Sea and film the event for reality television, if only he can “sprout some gonads for the occasion”.

Get A Copy

Paperback, 400 pages

Published April 1st 2016 by Guernica Editions

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Eel, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about The Eel

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

Showing 1-14

really liked it Average rating 4.00 ·

Rating details

· 8 ratings · 4 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of The Eel

Dec 07, 2017 Eddie Watkins rated it liked it

Shelves: canadian-fiction

Remarkably scholarly fiction that gathers bits of Blaise Cendrars' life and compositional style and applies them to what seems like the author's own life (appropriately mythologized a la Cendrars). Woven into this mix is a kind of international investigative thriller involving the recovery of Cendrars' ashes (of his body and his amputated arm) so to honor Cendrars' wish to be returned to the Sargasso Sea, the womb of all life. The ultimate aim of this adventure is the achievement of a "fugue sta ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Apr 26, 2017 Ian MacNeill rated it it was amazing

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzche would have appreciated The Eel; every page is covered in blood. Not the blood of violence, but the kind where a writer opens a vein to work. The Eel, by David Mackinnon, tells of Jack Fingon, a spiritual bankrupt and terminal peripatetic who finds solace and a kind of spiritual grounding in the writings of Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), a rather obscure Swiss-French novelist and poet popu “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzche would have appreciated The Eel; every page is covered in blood. Not the blood of violence, but the kind where a writer opens a vein to work. The Eel, by David Mackinnon, tells of Jack Fingon, a spiritual bankrupt and terminal peripatetic who finds solace and a kind of spiritual grounding in the writings of Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), a rather obscure Swiss-French novelist and poet popular with the brooding and angst ridden. Fingon sees in Cendrars a kindred spirit and determines, as homage to his literary doppelganger, to perform an unfulfilled duty to the man, which is to have his ashes spread in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the North Atlantic bounded not by land but by ocean currents; a suitable enough metaphor on its own for the rootless characters that swirl around in the eddying currents that make up The Eel. It is also the birthplace of the European eel, which hatch there before making a long and dangerous journey to the estuaries and fjords of Europe, hence the title of the book.

Fingon is not, for the most part, a very endearing character, but you can’t fault his determination. He is by parts contemptuous and arrogant, and as aggravatingly self-abnegating as one of those monks who flay their own skin in an effort to expiate their sins, both Original and voluntary. For many, Fingon will appear perverse. He, like his hero Cendrars, abandons first his birth family and later his marital and paternal responsibilities to pursue his own vision of himself as a poet rebel, which isn’t to say the book is not worth reading, quite the opposite. It is because McKinnon, an expatriate Canadian and recovering lawyer living in Amsterdam, stays true to character and pulls it off. Along with Fingon we’re treated to a curious cast of characters including one of Cendrar’s daughters, who may or may not have possession of the great man’s ashes, Fingon’s father, referred to as “the judge”, a dour and distant veteran of the Second World War who casts a disapproving eye on his son’s rejection of contemporary cultural values and responsibilities, and various other drop outs and drinking companions. Oddities abound, including times when the narrator breaks from the monologue to personally address what we eventually determine was an abandoned son. It’s like watching one of those movies where one of the actors suddenly turns to the camera and winks.

One of the book’s virtues is its erudition; MacKinnon is clearly well read and a thinker, and the book is studded with aphorisms and sly references ranging from the amusing to the frightening. “If a man’s thoughts aren’t his own by middle age, he has failed,” says Fingon. Or this from the judge: “The crime lives within us all and awaits only the circumstances to be acted out.” Like the Sargasso Sea itself, the book seems at times formless and boundless, but in the end that becomes its greatest strength, after all, we all feel that way sometimes, and some, like Jack Fingon, feel that way all the time. Mackinnon has been compared to writers like Henry Miller, who he lauds in this book and is clearly another of his literary heroes, but in this, Mackinnon’s fourth book, he appears to have found his own voice – it’s worth listening to.
...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 16, 2017 John Unsworth rated it it was amazing

For the erudite reader, the author revisits his brilliant Cendrars’ Quatrain in The Eel.
The protagonist, Jack Fingon, leaves a staid and boring upbringing and dissatisfying profession to knock about Europe where he discovers life and literary pleasures. Reading Blaise Cendrars “saves him” by charting an incitement to literary action, and Fingon decides to honour Cendrars’ curious wish for disposal of his ashes. The adventures and misadventures associated with his obsessive efforts to fulfill Cen ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 04, 2016 Walter MacDonald rated it it was amazing

David MacKinnon's novel The Eel is narrated by its protagonist, Jack Fingon. Fingon is a Canadian novelist, resident in France. The story he tells is simple enough. When he was a young man, he was inspired by the vagabond life and vivid writings of post-WWI French author Blaise Cendrars. Fingon owes a debt of gratitude to Cendrars, so when his publisher offers to introduce him to Cendrars's daughter, he jumps at the chance to meet her and repay the debt. His method of payment is to fulfil Cendra David MacKinnon's novel The Eel is narrated by its protagonist, Jack Fingon. Fingon is a Canadian novelist, resident in France. The story he tells is simple enough. When he was a young man, he was inspired by the vagabond life and vivid writings of post-WWI French author Blaise Cendrars. Fingon owes a debt of gratitude to Cendrars, so when his publisher offers to introduce him to Cendrars's daughter, he jumps at the chance to meet her and repay the debt. His method of payment is to fulfil Cendrars's written testamentary wish to return to the beginning of all life in the Sargasso Sea. Fingon interprets Cendrars's desire literally and plans to have a small measure of the cremated author's ashes injected into a living eel, a creature guaranteed by nature to return to its birthplace, the Sargasso Sea, thus fulfilling Cendrars's wish. It's a simple, if Quixotic, plan. Unfortunately for Fingon, Cendrars's daughter, who possesses or claims to possess her father's ashes, is ambivalent and non-committal about the idea. Her coyness frustrates him, but he is nothing if not determined to repay his debt to Cendrars, with or without his daughter's cooperation.

But the pleasure of reading Fingon's story is less in his recounting of events than it is in following the erudite, subterranean, labyrinthine, poignant, grief stricken, remorse plagued and fascinatingly obsessive contours of his mind. Fingon ranges far and freely over a myriad of subtly inter-connected subjects and experiences. There is scholarly, biographical detail about Cendrars's battle experiences in WWI, in which his arm was severed permanently. Beautifully rendered nostalgic scenes between Fingon and his lawyer father, a Catholic and a WWII RCAF pilot, whom he refers to as "the judge." Scientific digressions on eels and captivating detours on the artists and writers of 1920s Paris. Mysterious and compelling passages addressed to an unnamed "you." All of which is rendered in highly charged, psychologically complex, hypnotic language. What emerges is a portrait from the inside out of a hypersensitive, profoundly emotional, deeply wounded man, Jack Fingon, a man severed, like Cendrars's arm, from the things he prizes above all else and holds most dear. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

John Unsworth rated it it was amazing
Jun 16, 2017

Jul 10, 2020 David MacKinnon rated it it was amazing · (Review from the author)

Cruz Estrada rated it it was ok
Dec 22, 2017

Martin Llewellyn rated it it was ok
Jul 26, 2019

Guernica Editions added it
Feb 03, 2016

Pam marked it as to-read
Dec 20, 2016

Lutenzo marked it as to-read
Mar 04, 2017

Nick marked it as to-read
Jan 12, 2018

McKinley marked it as to-read
Sep 12, 2018

solitaryfossil marked it as to-read
Jan 15, 2019

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend It | Stats | Recent Status Updates

About David J. MacKinnon

David J. MacKinnon

3 followers

David J. MacKinnon is a Sorbonne graduate in history, a member of two law societies and has translated for the International Criminal Tribunals of Rwanda,the Hague & Yugoslavia. He is co-founder of the Long March to Rome, an indigenous-led mission seeking repeal of the Papal Bulls of Discovery. In earlier days, he worked as oil field roughneck, toilet factory worker, longshoreman and morgue attend ...more