La Voz de Galicia – September 2, 2022 →
It was the first time I was going to a reading club, and I confess it made me reflect about the meaning of getting together a group of diverse people around a book. When I returned to visit the reading club in Trives my sister Yoly attend, I came back thinking about the fact that in my professional life as a musician, I have not known an equivalent listening club…I suppose that in-person concerts serve as that part of collective experience: one attends a concert, listens, feels, and then, perhaps one speaks, or not, about the music that one has just listened to. But perhaps the concert does not create as curious a bond with the work and the group of people who come to listen to it as, I think, a weekly reading club creates. What all members have in common in this small club is that they all are passionate about reading, and in this place in Ourense, where its population changes in the summer to welcome all those who left or who have roots there, the club serves as well as the connection between those who live there all through the year and those who spend some time there. A beautiful intergenerational, and also intercultural, bond among various parallel realities that find themselves reading a book chosen by them all.
This particular club is a summer club that, lead by Rosa, was born precisely from that wish to recognize oneself through literature. And with this week’s session, they closed their season until next year. And thanks to them, I thought a little more about the social function of art and literature, and about those people who, out of love for their neighbors, decide to inspire a small group of diverse people to read a book and so find the time to take care of the most important thing in our lives: community.
