This is an excellent retelling of stories. The author does a wonderful job introducing the characters and writes in beautiful prose.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

The singing and dreaming came every night, from a distance. Different choirs every morning at dusk, marking the passage of time reminding me there is still love.

An intriguing project

Beautiful lyrical writing stream off consciousness.A book so unique so imaginative the author writes magically a book that needs to be shared and discovered by many readers who will be swept away .#netgalley #Noopiming

So I fell in love with Simpson when I read "Islands Of Decolonial Love". So reading Noopiming was a delight--to fall back into the winding powerful language that she pulses throughout her work. The fragments was such a subversion of novels--breaking up and breaking down the narrative bulk that comes with linear story telling that is so colonial and often times violent. Like the colonial framework is structured to be uninterrupted a wall of language that can be so dense it leaves no room for others to breathe or climb through--like so much silence comes through what words and forms are acceptable and palatable to the white supremacist construct of literature. Snapping open the format deconstructs how information and story can be percieved and altered and experienced. Without it losing people--its not too loose to where you fall through the air--which I love.

Noopiming just grapples with the fragmentary trauma internalized being Indigenous (how I perceive it is in the context of my Blackness, it's how I related)in the coil of white supremacy--utilizes that texture to embue meaning, voice, resonant rumbling music.

I don't know there is so much to be said about this novel. Like I dont have the words for. Just the feeling--like you just feel the work of undoing--the slow processing, churning contemplative way it shapes and maps out. Sometimes the quick, quivering fear that it won't. The hunger to reaching out for a future pulsed in the past punctured in the present--all of which happens at once and circles in and around. The need to piece back what's been stolen, what's been buried, tucked down down in the force of colonization.

Simpson really just has a dope energy that curls around her language choice and sound and how she builds people and their surrounding landscape. Her voice is just ensnaring and invigorating. I vibe 100%. Its good shit, love how it hums through.

I don't want to call NOOPIMING "experimental" because that implies the author is trying to create something entirely new, and it also implies that this novel is probably rather difficult to read, and maybe of interest only to the most intrepid readers among us...whereas this work, however unconventional in its structure, is endlessly delightful to read.

I feel the author's presence so strongly here. There is a constant, iterative, and loving questioning in the narrative voices in the novel that gives the story such personality and life.

It helped my reading to have these character descriptions, provided by the publisher, in front of me as I read:

"Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain."

The above description of the characters allowed me to visualize them, and to know what they represent metaphorically. But it's important to say also that the characters as they live on the page don't feel metaphorical. They feel real. Their feet hurt. They think about their budget. They are lovingly connected, and they love one another, and yet they are constantly contradicting one another. The metaphor never gets in the way of experiencing these characters as fully real.

The novel unfolds as a constant conversation and interaction between the selves that make up Mashkawaji. As I read I felt as if I was encountering the author herself, and that she was recreating for me on the page her constant, contradictory life's work of defining self as a Nishnaabeg storyteller, one who lives in the modern world, and one who must find a way both to understand her past, and learn to thrive in the flotsam of modern life.

This is a stream-of-consciousness work, blending the beautiful and rare with the mundane and ugly and the ineffable with the crass and the natural with consumption. The author writes with abandon and glee and anger and a certain unique kind of irateness, setting parts of a single character become their own autonomous beings, searching the world and First Nations traditions and the glare of the modern world for some kind of peace or wholeness. A single section in verse is perhaps the most effective part of the book, allowing for breath and space in the reading. This is a book to read slowly, and repeatedly, in order to suss out all of the meanings and connections. That said, it also often feels unedited and overwritten, unnecessarily purple in prose and insistent on its own importance.

This is a complicated review to write, especially as a white woman who spent the majority of this short novel confused or trying to remember details about characters mentioned pages before. I had the distinct experience of being an outsider to this piece of literature, and that is good sometimes. Simpson is playing with reality, technology, stereotypes, humor, and mother nature with her characters. These characters aren't entirely human or able defined in usual terms, but they do have opinions and personalities all the same. I loved Mindimooyenh, who seems to be obsessed with acquiring discount tarps. Simpson gives you just enough of a snapshot into the day of one character before throwing you somewhere else, everything loosely connected. I rooted for all of these characters. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, being an outsider to this specific indigenous culture (and an American outsider of Canada) meant that many references went over my head -- I tried to Google what I could but some words didn't automatically have results. Maybe the print copy will have some type of glossary? I think that could have improved my reading experience, but I understand that I might not have been the target demographic.

Noopiming is an incredibly interesting and thought-provoking work blending fiction with Anishinaabe storytelling. It feels almost experimental, the way the characters – who are physical manifestations of Mashkawaji* in the modern urban world – interact with one another. All the characters connect with one another in their search for community and a connection to the natural world, even as White Western culture swallows it up and covers it up with roads and garbage. There is a beauty in how unmoored this story feels, with no discernible “plot” – I had to work to put all the pieces together but it was very worth it. I definitely would like to check out more of the author's work.

*Mashkawaji is not a god, in the way the Western tradition would define a god-like being, but more a representation of community and tradition held in suspension; they are hard to explain as a character outside of the narrative but when reading their introduction at the beginning of the book that was the feeling I got.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press & NetGalley for the advanced reader's copy.

Available September 1st 2020

What a pleasure it is to be alive at the same time as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, what a wonder to experience her thoughts and words and art and point of view. A response to an 1852 memoir by a white Canadian settler, "Noopiming" breaths into what is considered barren frozen wasteland. Drawing on ancient myths, Nishnaabeg storyteller Simpson deconstructs what it means to be in the world into seven vital components, or the seven main 'characters', Akiwenzii the will, Ninaatig the lungs, Mindimooyenh the conscience, Sabe the marrow, Adik the nervous system, Asin the eys and ears, Lucy the brain. In contrast to her other works, "Noopiming" is more esoteric and pushes us as readers to consider existence as a whole. Simpson asks what it means to own and to belong, to count or to be counted, to love and to live. A dramatic, tender and creative reclamation of native America, this work is vital in today's political climate.