Scan barcode
A review by paisleygreen
Egg by Nicole Walker
4.0
What a delightful book! If you're not already familiar with the Object Lessons series out of Bloomsbury, they're short (roughly 150-page) books centering around a single object: bread, passwords, hoods, glass, and so on. In the words of object-oriented ontology, this series gives objects their due, exploring how the agency of things affects us and shapes our encounters with the world. This edition, written about the humble egg, comes from Nicole Walker, an essayist and creative nonfiction teacher known for her past works Quench Your Thirst with Salt, Bending Genre, and Micrograms. For Walker, eggs are "full of potential, fragility, and fertility"--and her quixotic collection reflects these same principles (132). A master of the braided essay, Walker's prose vacillates between discussions of eggs and personal memories, relationships, or thoughts on an increasingly fragile planet. For example, in the essay "Experiment with eggs by making a hollandaise in the time of global warming," she alternates recipes for various egg dishes (souffle, poached eggs, scrambled eggs) with abstract recipes for a planetary disaster: global warming, turtle extinction, an apocalyptic novel. Other standouts: "All the eggs in China," "So many eggs, one small basket," "The incredible, edible egg," and "'The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell'-Zora Neale Hurston."
For those who prefer drier nonfiction or the more analytical prose of the Object Lessons series (like Password, one of the driest in the bunch), this book may be something new. In a strict sense, this book isn't primarily informational; it's essayistic. No, the gaps between the braids are not neatly filled in; the reader must make some inferences about how composting eggshells and an elementary school balance-the-egg-on-the-spoon game. Most of the time, these braids work. Often, they're affecting in ways that surprised me: how could I get misty-eyed at a book about eggs? In any case, this is an unusual entry in the Object Lessons series, but it's one worth picking up if you're into really skillful creative essays.
For those who prefer drier nonfiction or the more analytical prose of the Object Lessons series (like Password, one of the driest in the bunch), this book may be something new. In a strict sense, this book isn't primarily informational; it's essayistic. No, the gaps between the braids are not neatly filled in; the reader must make some inferences about how composting eggshells and an elementary school balance-the-egg-on-the-spoon game. Most of the time, these braids work. Often, they're affecting in ways that surprised me: how could I get misty-eyed at a book about eggs? In any case, this is an unusual entry in the Object Lessons series, but it's one worth picking up if you're into really skillful creative essays.