As Good A Place As Any by Rebecca Pãpucaru
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Rebecca Pãpucaru’s debut novel, As Good a Place as Any, follows her teenage protagonist Paulina, who comes of age after she leaves Chile in 1973 for Toronto. The novel is divided into three “Acts” and an “Interlude,” which highlight the drama of this play within a novel. Despite its political problems, Chile always remains home for Paulina and her brother Ernesto, who tells her that Canada is “as good a place as any” to wait for their country to sort itself out. At first glance, the eponymous place is Toronto, but later in the novel we discover that “place” refers to a person, the object of Paulina’s desire: “Whoever she was, she was as good a place as any to start. Paulina would find her tomorrow.” Paulina finds her lover and partner Sylvia Lewis in books: first in a library book about lesbians, then in a city directory which leads her to Sylvia’s apartment. The novel traces a dynamic between place and displacement for immigrants, as well as the nature of good and evil.
“The novel traces a dynamic between place and displacement for immigrants, as well as the nature of good and evil.”
The epigraph from Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces addresses home: “Human rights should begin at home.” The novel opens with Paulina leaving home: “On the night they left Valparaiso, Paulina’s brother Ernesto asked their housekeeper to pack a suitcase for her.” The suitcase bookends the narrative in the final sentence as a container of heritage, migration, and coming of age: “Paulina returned the gesture, laughing aloud as she hurried to catch her bus, her mother’s suitcase secure in her hand.” Hand-me-down and home accompany the protagonist at each stage of her journey of self-discovery.
To get his sister out of Chile, Ernesto supplies her with tranquilizers from their father’s dental practice (and teeth are part of the descriptive pattern in this fiction of tongues.) The siblings are sponsored in Toronto by the Weinrib family, and they settle into their basement apartment attached to their hosts’ house on Major Street. Like Paulina’s housekeeper (Pilar) in Valparaiso, Mrs. Weinrib serves as her surrogate mother, a pillar on whom she leans for domestic protection: “Mrs. Weinrib gave her baby to her husband so she could help Paulina …. Helpless, Paulina clung to this strange Canadian woman like a tree in a mudslide.” From Ruth Weinrib, she learns about “Toronto’s Girl Problem” when women from Great Britain discovered sexual freedom in this Canadian city early in the twentieth century. Paulina wants to explore this problem.
Paulina tests the waters of her sexuality with a number of girls and women at school, even as she auditions for various roles in plays such as Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale where she becomes Marina, the figure floating in water on the book’s cover. She also tries out for parts in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. She remembers her favourite teacher in Chile, Sister Teresa, reading a poem by Gabriela Mistral: “And what ever happened / to the poor dead girls / so cleverly kidnapped from their April days / those who rose and submerged / like dolphins in the waves?” The lesson of the dolphins: domestic responsibilities would submerge the girls with only a flash of former insouciance breaking the waves. The female on the book’s cover is Mistral’s dolphin submerged and swimming in Toronto’s Girl Problem. For Paulina, an insouciant aquarium is as good a place as any.
During the “Interlude” section we are introduced to a number of theatrical characters, and at a party after one performance, “Paulina drank just enough beer to turn the evening into a blur of overlapping vignettes.” And those overlapping vignettes characterize “Interlude.” Act Three, “The Home for Wayward Daughters,” focusses on another social issue – abortion. The novel comes full circle from Galeano’s “Human rights begin at home” to the home for wayward daughters. Paulina finds herself in Canada, in Sylvia, and in Pãpucaru’s debut.
About the Author
Rebecca Papucaru's debut collection, The Panic Room (Nightwood Editions) was awarded the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and was also a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (Quebec Writers’ Federation) and long listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (League of Canadian Poets). Her short fiction has appeared in Grain, Event, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly; “Yentas” was awarded The Malahat Review‘s 2020 Novella Prize. She lives in Montreal.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Guernica Editions
Publication date : March 1 2025
Language : English
Print length : 200 pages