Publishers Weekly
11/16/2020
Canadian writer Simpson (As We Have Always Done) draws on indigenous Abinhinaabeg beliefs to create a bold, affecting portrait of an urban landscape and its network of living beings. Mashkawaji, two years after falling into ice and being frozen, remembers and experiences the world through a sensory connection to people, animals, and plant life in Toronto from her place under the ice. Naantig, a maple tree, is Mashkawaji’s lungs and normally resides in Tommy Thompson Park, but sometimes goes wandering. Adik, a caribou and Mashkawaji’s nervous system, discovers a discarded backpack and buys a digital recorder at Best Buy. Old man Akiwenzii (Mashkawaji’s “will”) putters around in a cluttered house described by the narrator as “bordering on Hoarders,” and Mindomooyenh (Mashkawaji’s conscience), a grandparent, spends their days buying tarps for homeless people. Thirty-something Native Asin (Mashkawaji’s eyes and ears) watches birds and gets frustrated by their friend Lucy’s (Mashkawaji’s brain) periodic disappearances. These characters, most of whom are referred to by gender neutral pronouns, cross paths with each other as they grapple with the often hostile, always shifting world of white people around them. The beautiful, brief episodes culminate in a celebration nearly toppled by the interference of raccoons. The tenderness and sly wit of these snippets coalesce into a beautiful image of Native resilience and a piercing, original novel. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
"Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming once again confirms her position as a brilliant, daring experimentalist and a beautiful, radical portraitist of contemporary NDN life. The prose hums with a lovingness that moved me to tears and with a humor that felt plucked right out of my rez adolescence. The chorus of thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries, poets, and misfits that Simpson conjures here feels like a miracle. My heart ached and swelled for all of them. What I adored most about this book is that it has so little to do with the white gaze. Simpson writes for us, for NDNs, those made to make other kinds of beauty, to build other kinds of beautiful lives, where no one is looking. Noopiming is a book from the future! Simpson is our much-needed historian of the future!"—Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms
"I'm pretty sure we don't deserve Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. But miracles happen, and this is one. This book is poem, novel, prophecy, handbook, and side-eyed critique all at once. This book doesn't only present characters you will love and never want to leave, it doesn't only transform the function of character and plot into a visibly collective dynamic energy field (and hallelujah), but it also cultivates character in the reader, that we might remember what we first knew. Which is that what seems separate was never separate. What feels impossible is already happening. And it depends on our most loving words. It requires our most loving actions towards each other. The ceremony has been found."—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Dub: Finding Ceremony
"Noopiming is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s myriad literary gifts shine here—her scalpel-sharp humor, her eye for the smallest human details, the prodigious scope of her imaginative and poetic generosity. The result is a book at once fierce, uproarious, heartbreaking, and, throughout and above all else, rooted in love."—Omar El Akkad, best-selling author of American War
"The tenderness and sly wit of these snippets coalesce into a beautiful image of Native resilience and a piercing, original novel."—Publishers Weekly
"Simpson's skill as creator allows those outside Indigenous traditions to apprehend a complexity of meaning-making whose fluidity challenges Western reliance on notions of fixed boundaries and discrete categories of being and nonbeing."—Star Tribune
"Probably unlike anything you’ve ever read, this remarkable novel is written in prose and fragments and is an alarmingly beautiful tale of decolonial resistance and the uncovering of a world of natural abundance, connection and compassion."—Ms. Magazine
"Fascinating, brief, vivid."—Novel Gazing Redux
"Noopiming is an important literary work that transcends form and breaks molds of storytelling in contemporary Western consciousness."—Colors of Influence
"If you are reading more diversely to learn about different cultures, then dive into the culture. Embrace the language. Open your mind to perspectives that are different from your own."—Carry a Big Book
"A novel that is intellectually challenging both as literature and as a commentary on colonialism. Fragments of poetry and prose bring the reader into the Anishinaabe way of storytelling as an essential element of the good life."—Ely Summer Times
"Jumping amongst seven characters who represent the machinations of human life, the text challenges the racism and modern absurdities that affront, but can never replace, traditional lifeways."—Tribal College Journal
"Award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson combines narrative and poetic fragments in this truly original novel about a long-ago time of hopeless connection and finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension."—The Story Exchange
"Anishinaabe for ‘in the bush,’ Noopiming offers a different approach at telling a story, a revisioning and decolonizing of narrative that deconstructs everything we might expect from a story. "—Chicago Review of Books
