Lino de Albergaria - writer

Biography

Lino Albergaria majored in Literature and Communication and received a master’s degree in Editorial Business issued by the University of Paris. He was born in Belo Horizonte and has lived in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Lino has published many stories in magazines and in literary supplements throughout Brazil; some of his work has also been published in Belgium. Although he is the author of two novels for adult readers, Lino’s work is mainly directed to youngsters. Holder of a doctorate degree in Portuguese literature, he has done various translations from French originals into Portuguese.

Lino de Albergaria, the eldest of five children, was born in Belo Horizonte, on 24 April 1950. The city, according to his childhood memories, was greener and the streets were paved with stones which were later replaced with asphalt. On these streets, there were tracks along which cable cars ran. Flight of doves crossed the sky of his neighborhood and stray dogs were common. Today, the sparrows have disappeared and were substituted by tyrant flycatchers. It did not used to be so hot, the nights were cooler, and there were not so many buildings. As most houses, the one he grew up in, on Espiríto Santo Street, by Contorno Avenue, had a backyard where dogs and chickens run among fruit trees: jabuticaba, mango, avocados, pitanga and guavas.

The families around his home had normally moved into the city from small towns; parents and grandparents were almost never born in the capital of Minas. His father, who had worked with convicted people and abandoned children, liked reading and writing. His mother liked binding books whose cover she would embroider with golden letters until one day when she broke her hand and could never recuperate the strength required to handle the leather. She then started painting porcelain dishes and wooden boxes. Both his parents were born on farms. Accordingly, Lino and his siblings spent their school holidays on a rural property his father had inherited. He found everything to be pleasantly different in the country, specially its smell and noise, as well as people’s manners and language. However, it was in the city that he had a room full of books, his father’s office and a library.

The first tales he heard were from colorful compact disks; one of which was blue and told the story of Ali Baba. One day he opened the door of the library, after having heard the disc for the millionth time. Inside, in the dark, walls were covered with books laid on shelves. It seemed as mysterious as Ali Baba’s cave. He had a feeling that he could almost say "Open, sesame" and the books, he could not still read, would open themselves for him. The faces and figures on the book covers seemed to stare at him, and its papers to surrender to him when he pulled a volume to underneath the table. It was there, his imaginary dark cave, where he could hide from the world, thinking of Ali Baba and his treasure. One day he dared to grab a double pointed blue and red pencil, common in those days, and over the pages of a book he wrote another. That was his first attempt, before even knowing the alphabetic letters, of writing his own book.

Eagerly, even before entering school, he learned to read. He continued to visit the space under the table of the library, which was calm and dark. It was a place to escape with his books and where he could let go of the backyard: the trees, the dogs and the chicken named Ximbica. He finished elementary school, always willing to write, in a school where he did not last very long, Instituto Ariel, whose name is of a Shakespeare character chosen by a poet, Abgar Renault.

He discovered adolescence in another nearby school, Colégio Estadual, whose architectural form is still deemed a state-of-the-art deed meant to remind of school objects. Its auditorium looks like an old blotting paper and the water tank a piece of chalk. Oscar Niemeyer was the architect responsible for that construction. Although Lino had started studying literature in school, he could not yet understand the connection between those two schools and the people or the cultural movement ideas, viz. modernism, they made reference to. Moreover, he did not reckon that those were the thoughts of that time and when, as young as ten, went to see Juscelino Kubitschek at Liberty square, he only knew that that man was the president who had moved the capital of Brazil onto another city.

He was admitted into two different colleges simultaneously: one in the morning, to major in Philology, still on Carangola street then, and another in the evening, Communication, in Coração Eucarístico neighborhood which seemed very far then. Time was on a verge of changes: the city was growing, and it was dictatorship times. An urge of getting to know the world grew inside Lino; freedom seemed to be overseas. He got a job for a short while as a corporate newspaper editor, and as soon as he could, he left to France what was to be his first time away from his city.

Paris was just like it was on postcards, excepted for the fact that it was not static. The pictures he saw on the cards were now connected either by subways or on foot. It felt odd to walk under the earth, like an armadillo, and then come up to the light, a dimmed light, so different from the bright light of Belo Horizonte. Most of the time, Paris was grey. The train went direct to his editing course in Villetaneuse. For his probation period at the children’s library, in Petit-Clamart where there was real snow and green pine trees throughout the year, he could go by bus. On the other side of the Atlantic, he reencountered his father’s office: a world of books, which he then learns to make. His contact with children makes him write his first children story; actually folk tales adaptations.

On his return to Brazil, in order to be able to work with books, he settles down in São Paulo. Both writer and editor felt at home there. He works for FTD Publisher, on a didactic collection, and later dedicates himself to juvenile literature. He then spends a short period of time in Rio de Janeiro, watching the tiny Rio Graphics store become the big Globo Publisher. Besides editing for different authors, he also publishes his own texts in various publishing houses in different cities around the country. He returns to São Paulo, works as a freelancer for magazines issued by Abril Publisher. He witnesses, at that time, the redemocratization of the country. He lives a constant disquietude: an unstable life which has an adventurous taste. On his return to Belo Horizonte, he wants to make room for writing and studying. It is then that Lino writes two books for adult readers, one of which is the finalist for the Biennial Nestlé of Literature and the other awarded in the State of Paraná Contest, as well as the winner of the Jabuti.Awards. He begins his master’s degree whose theme was to compare juvenile literature of that moment in history with the one of the flourishing of feuilletons in the XIX century. He restarts working as an editor at the Lê and Dimensão Publishers. He pursues his studying and begins his doctorate. He chooses as a theme the town of Ouro Preto and the modernism movement; the confluence of works between Lucio Costa, Cecília Meireles and Guignard. His fascination for Ouro Preto is the discovery of the counterpoint of Belo Horizonte against a memory of a past Paris still has.

But, his writing continues. There is a commitment with his readers and mainly with writing, perhaps because there is still a debt with his childhood. The sesame seed has to open and reproduce itself, always in a new plant.