LAGOS READING CLUB, by José Garrido and Rui Couceiro

September 12 | 6:00 PM

Location: Municipal Library of Lagos Org.: CM Lagos Duration: 2h Age rating: M18 (limit of 25 participants) All activities at the Municipal Library are free to participate, but prior registration is required up to 48h before the event via phone 282 767 816, Facebook page of the Library, or email biblioteca@cm-lagos.pt. Each initiative requires a minimum number of participants. If this is not reached, the activity may be canceled.

Theme for 2026: IN A PLEASURABLE PENANCE: THE RESCUE OF THE LANGUAGE. WHAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN PORTUGAL SINCE THE MILLENNIUM BUG.

There are several reasons that distance us from the language, from the use and enjoyment of good Portuguese. The natural openness to other cultures and the increase in linguistic skills coexist today with increasingly careless translations of texts and subtitles, often automated. Therefore, we propose an immersion, with delight, in a selection of works in Portuguese from Portugal published since the year 2000.

Book for reading: Baiôa without a date to die, by Rui Couceiro When a young teacher decides to accept the hand that fate extends to him, he is far from imagining that, from that moment on, he will go from mere spectator to narrator and character of his own life. In his grandparents' village, in the deepest Alentejo, Joaquim Baiôa, an old handyman, decided to recover the houses that the owners had voted to abandon and thus rehabilitate Gorda-e-Feia, before death comes to claim it. This is the ideal pretext for a pause in teaching and the calming of a hurried daily life imposed by modernity. But in Gorda-e-Feia, death insists on coming out into the streets, and the tranquility the young teacher longed for becomes a time of scarcity, while, together with Baiôa, he tries to fight against the desertification of a condemned world. In a novel that is both poetic and ironic, filled with memorable characters and imaginative exuberance, and constructed like a web that thickens with the rhythm of reading, Rui Couceiro puts face to face two antagonistic worlds, the urban and the rural, and two generations that meet halfway, over the dust that is tinged red, the younger waiting, the older without a date to die.

Free parking - The Cultural Center of Lagos and the Municipal Library of Lagos offer free parking in the Ribeirinha Front park (Avenida dos Descobrimentos) for the audience of their shows/events. To receive this discount, the user must present, at the park's reception, a stamp obtained at the ticket office of the Cultural Center of Lagos or the entrance of the Municipal Library of Lagos. The offer only applies one hour before and up to one hour after each show/event.