Lino de Albergaria - writer

A Word from the Author

About my writing and my person

Writing books, I have discovered, is not overly different of writing letters. Each book is nothing but a piece of a letter, regardless of how extent it may become. A new word added to this text, yet to be finished, wants, more than anything, to keep the reader’s attention. Being read is to be heard.

I believe, primarily, that every writer is a reader. Undoubtedly, the reader makes up the author. A phrase attributed to Flaubert, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi ", whose authenticity is still discussed, in various attempts of interpretation, would, ultimately, mean to me: "As well as my character Emma Bovary, I am a reader ".

For some people, Flaubert would be defending himself from the lawsuit he underwent for undermining the morality and good conduct of the nineteenth century. A great deal of realism that he applied to his novel would have caused many of his readers to believe that he spoke of an adulterous woman of real existence. However, it was all fiction, the author’s imagination. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary, reader of romantic works, wove her tragedy for believing in her readings.

Flaubert's biography shows that he was also an exaggerated reader. Even since high school years, back in Rouen, he would never abandon his novels, a constant companion in his room. The addiction that he lent Emma did not desert him even when he wrote "Bouvard and Pecuchet." He is supposed to have read more than a thousand volumes in order to write it.

Our José de Alencar, in his autobiography "How and why I am novelist", emphasizes his reading habit both in schools environments, evoking his master Januário Mateus Ferreira, as well as in family evenings when, as with Flaubert and Emma Bovary, he registered within his spirit a scarce repertoire of romances.

Alencar wrote, recalling his youth, "It was me who read to my good mother not only letters and newspapers, but also the book load of this tiny romantic bookstore formed over time ...). My mother and my aunt took care of the sewing work, and their friends, in order not to be idle, helped them. Passed the first moments of conversation, we went on to a reading session and I was always invited to the place of honor”. And he wondered: "Was this continuous and repeated reading of novels and romances that first imprinted within me this taste to this literary genre which is among all the one of my predilection?” ALENCAR, José de. How and why I am novelist. Campinas: Pontes, 1990

I am not and have never been a compulsive reader, nor has the taste for books damaged my fate as happened to poor Bovary. I remember that I was still illiterate, but already enjoyed listening to stories, not only through the human voice, but also from colored long-plays for children of my generation. My favorite vinyl told the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." I would listen repeatedly to the long history, which took up the space of two discs. However, it was not the adventures of the eastern merchant what enchanted me. I would imagine the cave of treasures and password, which so magically revealed the "Open, Sesame!”

There used to be one room in my house- my family’s house actually- which was my father's office and library. It had no windows and the walls were full of books, which I could not read because I had not been alphabetized yet. It was a dark, uterine and mysterious room as the cave in the story of Ali Baba. Figures seemed to spy on me from the cover pages. Book pages surrendered to the operation of my hands when I, alone, entered that empty room which attracted me so much. Perhaps, the books blinked at me, pretending they were the treasures lining the walls of that enchanted place. A voice, for me anonymous, described the discs.

One day, I could not help but to take a pencil off the desk- a pencil of two ends; one blue and one red- open a book and scribble another book right on top of it. I was trying to tell a story through drawings, with human figures and animals, in red and blue. I was, at the age of three, creating my first book, my personal version of a palimpsest. My mother found it interesting and put the current date on it. Thirty years later, she gave it to me.

In the meantime, I went to school, deciphered the codes of reading and writing, became passionate about literature, which made me take a philology degree and head to France in order to study publishing because I wanted to work with books and learn to manufacture them.

There, I got involved with children's literature, did internships in magazines and built a library for children. In fact, my approach to the gender is no coincidence, as only those kinds of places and people would accept me as an intern.

When I returned to Brazil, I worked as an editor in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and finally in Belo Horizonte my hometown, where I first published my books dedicated to young readers. As the author of books for children and young people, I ended up being invited for lectures and conversations with readers inside schools, the perfect environment. It was when I had the chance of confronting my readers. I became aware that I do not write for myself, nor by an uncontrollable impulse. I write for people of flesh and blood that can talk to me and be heard. Many authors in this area do not like to visit schools. I am always very curious of what can go on there and, honestly, I have a taste for these meetings. I have learned to take into account the opinion of some readers. Sometimes they express a wisdom that I have never found in my reading and I incorporate them into my books and my writing.

Thus, schools have become the perfect scenery of my stories when I adopt realism in my literature. I can create characters close to my readers, who spend much of their time in school. I also like to represent the children’s families: parents, siblings, grandparents who co-act with the classmates and teachers of my heroes, preferably preteens. There, at school or at home, they act and relate to each other; live conflicts; discover the obstacles and sufferings of life or joy and hope. For younger children, happy endings are mandatory. They claim it because the majority of fairy tales have incorporated this notion. A happy ending is the promise of future, hope and confidence in our projects in life. Hope justifies it.

However, I also create stories whose time perception does not feel real, as in the suspended time of fairy tales. That is when my imagination goes wild and chases images that the unconscious suggests. These fantastic and adventurous stories are my tribute to my first hero, Ali Baba

Lately, I have realized that writing for a young audience have something similar to the act of writing a letter: when writing letters, we keep in mind our interlocutor, and in order to get his/her attention, we get closer to their language and their interest. It is not that the reader should take, alone, the tone of the game, but we become more motivated to talk about our concerns, if we know how to match the recipient's expectations. It is not a matter of manipulation because incorporating what has been heard from him/her in our writing becomes, somehow, a kind of dialogue.

I also enjoy reading my readers productions. Not only those who discover me and write to me directly, but ever since I started having access to the Internet, I began to realize that there are people who talk about me and of what I write, mainly in their electronic diaries and blogs. Often I try to communicate back with them, not always though. There are people who find it hard to believe that the book's author, whom they have made a comment about, is actually replying, in person or virtually, to what they have said. Once, a young man, with my namesake, had been writing to an author of a blog. Because many different authors dialogued extensively with him, I concluded that we all had become his characters. Thus, not even writes can escape the fiction which literature brings us. That was how I became “the other.

Thus, as much as I can be my readers, they can be, in a way, myself. Anyway, we are all Madame Bovary, pretending, as in Fernando Pessoa’s construct, to be the pain, the pain we really feel. Our dilemma, as well as our common pleasure, is that we all belong to the same class of readers.

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