The novel Opera in the key of X It is the story of several women intertwined in a plot, where its author offers a unique narrative that pierces from the feminine to the diverse. Its pages invite us to read a concert of voices and bodies where each chapter is the act of an opera. The female protagonists dance their lives in a world of men; there these are loved ones, companions or also lacerating scalpels. After each wound, a new brand will be inaugurated, interweaving the rescue of each experience.
Its editor, Mara Laporte, tells us on the back cover: “There is an emotional matter on which Vala—witness narrator, character, author—lays her gaze in each of these stories that are at the same time anecdote, chronicle, family saga and poetry, and that emotional matter is the wound or, more beyond the wound, the ways we find to heal it. It is this transformative and moving process from pain to relief, that vital metamorphosis from chrysalis to butterfly in which each character finds ways to channel their life that Valeria Casal Passion comes to tell us with love, and also with humor, in this book which is words and also music.
“I love the poetic ambivalence of a scar: here it hurt, here it healed,” Louise Madeira once said. That’s what it’s all about. Like a cunning illusionist on stage who invites us to watch the graceful movements of one of her hands while she hides the trick in the other, Casal Passion shows us the signs of a wound to actually tell us about the possibilities of healing. And vice versa”.
Valeria, why an Opera in the key of X?
The key in a musical work opens, it is the key. From its overture to its finale, the reader encounters a warp of passions that make up each thread of a vital interweaving ending in an iridescent parade of characters. X is an opening, the infinite possibility of bodies and their destinies, the irreverence and tenacity of each protagonist. It is an invitation not to save oneself, but to inaugurate the power of new brands where there was a wound.
Valeria, you are a Graduate in Music Therapy, a Specialist in Bioethics and a Writer. Does your professional practice impact your writing?
Yes of course. My history and my own readings too. I practice in the field of palliative care and in the violence clinic. As a music therapist I work in contexts of fragility where the fundamental thing will be to shelter the voices and bodies when they are in pain or when they have been injured. In relation to violence, I consider that it is exercised on voices and bodies. Bioethics has given me a necessary rights-based approach that runs through my books and writings. The aim will be to offer the patient the possibility of an expressive and corporal sound display, the encounter with the power of oneself. Spinoza already said it: “No one, until now, has determined what the body can do.”
Where can your books be found?
Opera in the key of X was published by Editorial Letra Viva (2022).
This year I have co-compiled and co-authored published Matter of life. Listening and the interdisciplinary perspective in palliative care, beyond biological hegemony. Ed. Roots (2023). I have written prologues and chapters of academic books, the essay Habeas corpus. Art, the human and other misunderstandings (2023) forthcoming and The voice and the body in the clinic (2020), the latter co-authored. I have previously published the book of stories Play on the other side. Childhood, femininity and dictatorship (Ed. Letra Viva, 2014).
Where can both patients and those interested in your books and writings contact you?
Through my website www.valeriacasal.com
And my Instagram profile @casalpassion
by CEDOC