Code Noir

Reviews

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE

"A collection that is profound and inveterately inventive, Code Noir expands what is possible in the realm of narrative. With purposeful defiance, Lubrin writes stories that cut effortlessly across eras and continents with the Black diaspora, within and against a history of institutionalized violence and oppression. She pushes against the laws governing what words can and can’t do, emerging finally with a sharp-edged language that is entirely sui generis. Lubrin’s work is conceptual genius, allusive across a wide swath of culture, from jazz to literature to art. Code Noir is a singular achievement.” —2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize jury (Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike)

“Brilliant, challenging, and ecstatic. . . . Code Noir refracts hundreds of years of history into a lively book of fictions. . . . The end result is exactly right, obscuring and countering, rewriting and reweaving, the colonial ordering of the world. . . . [A] dazzling achievement.” —The Globe and Mail

“Visceral, disruptive. . . . Astonishing. . . . Canisia Lubrin has turned her attention to fiction in her striking new work, Code Noir . . .  play[ing] with form, time, and polyvocality . . . grounded in the making and unmaking of historical narratives of Black diasporic experience.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Original and inspiring. . . . Lubrin’s poetry and prose share . . . a keen awareness of the impact of history on the common lives of those of us who live within the Black diaspora. . . . In [Code Noir], Lubrin’s world is one in which we are continually rethinking our past, questioning our present, and inventing the future. . . . Structured, but with an improvised feel, Code Noir is a cooperative contradiction of time and space, of melody and rhythm, of Black lives and Black matters.” —The Ampersand Review

“An interconnected allegory. . . . Lubrin’s iconoclastic flights subvert hierarchies and cover continents and aeons of pain. . . . Torkwase Dyson’s drawings depict these allegories . . . [adding] a fuller picture to Lubrin’s already fulsome text.” —The Miramichi Reader (starred review)

“Written in language that crackles with life and humour, the stories in Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir: Metamorphoses usher us into the lives of their narrators, lives that are filled with a kind of wonder and surprise. Such an invitation to enter and imagine their worlds. In its formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness, Code Noir is unlike anything else that I’ve ever read. Lubrin is a force.” —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes and In the Wake

“Code Noir is a revelation. Proof that it is possible for an imagination to outpace the rest of us, and beckon from a future far richer and more brilliant than anything we know. This book sings in searing language, telling stories that bristle and challenge, comfort and question. Canisia Lubrin is one of the finest writers and thinkers of our time, and in Code Noir is a voice that, once heard, can never be forgotten." —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“Code Noir is storytelling at its deepest and most intimate. The stories take you into their confidences – confidences that are knowing, but at the same time defamiliarizing. You have to meet their speakers wherever they are in their lives. These speakers know things they shouldn’t know and, uncannily, they know things that you know. Things about lullabies and dogs and elephants. The stories say, loneliness is nostalgia; they listen to Billie Holiday during a war; they know the decrees of Code Noir, that 17th century rulebook for Black life; they know the realm of time, where best friends drown in rivers. Some of these stories are like looking through blue sea glass, some are like drinking strong liquor, some are like a whiff of smoke and then an orange light. These stories are magic and you must enter them as if you, too, are wondrous.” —Dionne Brand, author of Nomenclature, Theory, and Map to the Door of No Return

“A singular achievement.” —Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife

"A book that radiates life—insistent, unbounded life. . . . A virtuosic assembling of genres, voices and experience . . . with lines gripping the heart and stories suffused with beauty and tenderness." —David Chariandy, author of Brother Expand reviews