Lino de Albergaria - writer

Reviews

Lino de Albergaria simultaneously launches two novels about a love maze (lonely, but no Minotaur). Besides being alike regarding its psychological intensity, the two narratives also dialogue with the literary canon through innumerous epigraphs.

In The 31 days, a mysterious narrator approaches “The Arabian Nights”, as she remembers her own emotional disagreements.

From a monologue, in The 31 Days, we are lead through a dialog in “A Dutch dancer”, where two narrators alternate and investigate themselves for being intrigued by each other.

The presence of the state capital is also strong in the two novels. The town where the author was born and lives reveals and hides details of the maze about which Roland Barthes describes in his Fragments of a Lover's Discourse.

Nelson de Oliveira

In dozens of books for children and youth, the author deals with accuracy and sensitivity the typical conflicts of the human growth. Written in an agile language, rich in stylistic features and engendered through elaborate storytelling, Lino’s plots highlights the effort of his characters to get to know themselves better as well as the world around them.

Sérsi Bardari

Concise, conversational and vivid language, perfectly in tune with the interest and level of understanding of young readers. ( ... ) Grace and delicacy of feeling are the hallmarks of the narratives. ( ... ) Difficult and dangerous themes received here an adequate and credible treatment. ( ... ) Lively and poetic novelistic plot, which involves the reader from beginning to end.

Nelly Novaes Coelho

The result is a good book, which neither the history nor the simplicity of its characters prevents the common or intellectualized reader to enjoy the delights of reading.

Teresinka Pereira

Anyway, this is truly a love story, written with capital A. After all, it is with the written word, in a classroom space, that this book makes us realize a beautiful journey. A tribute to the real school environment.

Benedito Antunes

Now, in The Rainy Season, he dives, with density, into the human psyche and reveals the pain and the delight of the verb to live.

Alécio Cunha

The emotional connection at the base of a three-dimensional love: Eros, Philo, Agape. The fallen leaves perpetuated in a photo as memories that are there after the fall, and the difficulty of revealing feelings resurface in poetic phrases and social questions.

Manoel Lobato

This exchange allows the author to tile intellectual and affective experiences, openly opted as being fundamental to the human existence. In other words, the confrontation between the demands that the adult rationality imposes on children versus their (children) spontaneous demonstrations, the author expresses himself unequivocally by the latter by building a secondary role and irrelevance to the former. In this sense, he opposes to the tendency that systematically disregards the children's sensitivity. Lino’s text aims at rescuing the “Child’s feel” as a vital force, able to constitute itself as an essential formative element. ( ... ) In its simplicity, the book Words from the Heart are Different is a sensitive work from an author who believes in the vital role of emotions of infanthood.

Edmir Perrotti

Amid unsalted or uninspired stories, which load the bookstores’ shelves, Lino de Albergaria managed to capture a magical moment between two preteens. As a quick game (first, second and third acts, and the curtain falls) the story lasts as long as does the emotion. There is no waste of pages. No excess of words. "

Tangolomango won the second place of the Henrietta Lisbon Children's Literature Award (...). The book is beautiful. It contains mystery, sweetness, duet between people and things. It has poetry, grace, lightness and a writing style we do not want to end.

Maria do Carmo Brandão

In recent years, he has built a solid work that shows particular sensitivity to grasp the difficult transition from childhood into adulthood.

Our Berlin Wall portrays the school environment in which two different classes see themselves as enemies. ( ... ) A short and well-developed story."

Lino de Albergaria, a writer who has been acclaimed on every new work, addresses, in a very original way, the issue of racial bias in The Foreign Correspondent.

Laura Sandroni

In a literary world such as in Brazil, devoid of texts that reflect in an artistic and respectful manner the pre- adolescence, Lino’s text stands out. ( ... ) In The Hand of the Enchanted, we face an extreme situation, to the extent that the narrative is lead to a place between magic realism and naturalistic realism, covering both trends, with no detachment, respecting the characters’ cultural values. Full of poetry, of respect for the characters, free of melodrama or false modesty, The Hand of the Enchanted is a beautiful moment of reflection on the backwardness and misery that persist in our hinterlands, to be understood and discussed by our youth readers. A beautiful release.

Antonio Hohlfeldt

An example of a lighter and easier to read book is From Paris with Love (...). Fleeing the stereotypical courtship that publishers have released in droves in the 90s, Lino de Albergaria’s book breaks the habits created by clichés and simplifications and enriches the students' reading with its literary prose so well refined and simple.

Maria Alice Faria

Through a restrained style, without concessions to the romantic, and sometimes even exaggerating on this contention, Albergaria can seduce and hold the reader. This certainly happens because, despite his carefulness as not to slip into sentimentality, he gives his characters humanity enough to trigger identification and then adhesion.

Angela Leite de Souza

"And it is in The Name of the Son that he addresses himself directly to the readers, from the first lines, in a conversational and intimate tone, in order to seek for complicity. Whispering into the ear, this multifaceted narrative, which allows us to see the material and scaffolding that supports its building, is certainly welcome. Wandering between detailed and reticent, this novel leads to reflection on how to face and scrutinize the boundaries of fiction and life (...)

Maria do Carmo Lanna Figueiredo

He is constantly twirling a lock of hair on his finger while talking with us. His speech shows his gentle manner, something easily observed among “mineiros”. Lino de Albergaria has traveled to twenty countries lived in France, in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. However, whenever he felt worn out, he headed back to Belo Horizonte (MG), the city where he was born. The window in his apartment´s bedroom, where he writes every morning, faces Serra do Curral and it is right there, looking out his window that Lino stares at a horizon of mountains as he waits for inspiration. When ideas start coming, they jump right into the computer and out in lines and more lines of texts. It feels so different from the time when he began writing in the mid- 80s, a time he used to fill in folders and more folders with newspapers and magazine clippings. Today he uses only his head, books for consultation , a computer , a dictionary and a radio connected to play any tune/thing "that goes in one ear and out the other" as he says. From his head, Lino strips conversation pieces and scenes he has witnessed which might help arouse bright ideas. Each story is written four times. Prior to the final version, the text goes into a drawer in order to "get some rest."

Rosangela Guerra (Nova Escola)

"Lino de Albergaria is “mineiro” from Belo Horizonte, has studied publishing and children's literature in France (...). He says that it is complicated to write books for very young children, for he has to use simple structures (which is not to say to make a simplistic thing) and with a short text tell a different story. There is also a concern with the vocabulary, since young children do not have a lengthy time of language domain.

When speaking about the Brazilian production, he says that literature has grown from (...) the presence of books written by national authors at schools. Moreover, there has been the emergence of a new generation of writers; whose new vision of text and the world have questioned the traditional literature, boring didacticism and moralism. He explains that the editorial expansion has suffered a setback because of the Brazilian economic crisis and that the era of a production boom is long gone. As positive points of this former boom for children’s literature, Lino de Albergaria pinpoints the quality of the texts, the variety of the subjects, the emergence of a generation of illustrators and the editorial investment made in the area. 'He also highlights he negative aspects which are the opportunism that arose when this large production emerged. There was more quantity than quality itself ‘, he explains”

Walter Sebastião (Tribuna de Minas)

Lino de Albergaria, in his new periplus, chose the city of Belo Horizonte as a perfect setting for his books “The 31 Days" and “A Dutch Dancer.” To what extent does the city interfere with such process, which involves light and shadow, terror and enchantment? Lino tries, through his books, to build a kind of dialogue. He uses, in a precise way, the resources he has. In addition, he achieves a refined literary deed. Everything is intertwined in a game involving drama and eroticism, all in the exact dose.

André di Bernardi

Yesterday, I finished reading “The 31 Days “. I liked the fragmented narrative in which everything moves and undoes itself, deceiving the reader with a series of clues and allusions that evoke the mechanism of dreams. Everything seems to, suddenly, the literary ghost of a certain Mr. Italo Calvino will depart from “If in a winter night a traveler” to reemerge in a dark corner of Marilia Dirceu Square, escorted by David Lynch and his characters in " Mulholand Drive " ... Only, it does not. It simply is not the course taken by the textual entity Marilia/ Juliana/ Scheherazade/ Duniazade, which Lino de Albergaria builds up and deconstructs, in a dreamlike contexture of a beautiful text, which feeds itself on (de-) memory, history and literary culture. The reader has to wait- as would a psychoanalyst, for the last session, namely, the last chapter - to finally recover the thread of meaning of this amazing book. I also immensely enjoyed the work “A Dutch Dancer “. Again, there is the dreamlike mood of the narrative present in “The 31 Days “. I emphasize its quasi- merger of the narrator/characters voices involving the reader in a touching and original story about love, loneliness and transience of life.

Ana Cecília Carvalho

It is an extraordinary book of fiction. The plot is clever, ambitious and confronts two very special protagonists: a reader inside a bookstore and its salesperson who decides to turn that reader into his character, becoming thus the writer.

A very few times, in our literature, a book has been taken as a character in a plot; a book is made as a bait between the reader and the salesperson; it is a presence as strong as the two men are.

The metaphorical and symbolic elements, most established in literature, are present: (flight, identity, freedom, travel, city, creation, commitment, the ambiguous nature of the roles we assume in emotional relationships and homoeroticism. Such elements crisscross themselves due to its clear language and strong power of suggestion, what creates a style that is focused on the exploration of the human quest in art and against loneliness).

Although its theme feeds, very much, on his close look at the art minutiae, it is sensitivity, human emotional deviation and the eternal search for meaning to what we do and with whom we do it, which brings out striking human truths. A book that manages the prodigy of being deep to the heart and spirit.

Paulo Bentancur

The qualities of a sensitive and yet striking text are evident. It is the combination of two narratives; in one of them, there is the prevalence of an erotic game, from the first exchange of glances between the two characters: a salesperson in a bookstore, and a client. On a different plan, the latter is the narrator and who makes up and participates in the scene, while the former acts as a character, being directed in his actions, whilst maintaining an autonomy, which strains the relationship.

In sum, they are games created from rummages of varied textures and combination (entanglement) of the resources of the literary composition. A very refined writing level. Moreover, the references about a world of subtleties - music, literature - are so striking in it that they add an atmosphere of refinement to the whole reading. After all, it is about an affair, which starts in a bookstore. The references may even belong to a narrator 's imagination plan, which muses ( goes wild ) from the moment he has a glimpse of a client who attracts him (would he have imagined it all, using as raw material a reality end? Is it possible to define what reality is here? ) . There are different readings suggested by the plot / story.

Luiz Antônio Aguiar

However, the major force, which leads this tessitura, is the magic with which the author guides the history. His writing displays a composition of strong intensity, full of alternatives, which entice the reader. This writing does not forsake the agility of its images, provocative charm, or elegance when telling fictional events of various kinds. Again, Lino de Albergaria positively surprises us with a bold and beautiful text, amongst the finest production of contemporary literature.

Wagner Moreira

We have always suspected or known that the narrators want to “deceive" us with their stories. Moreover, those who narrate in the first person may be the ones who try to mislead us from the stories the most. However, maybe that is precisely the role of fictional texts: fool us with their lies. If so, then why do we continue to get emotional with the unreal, with what is simply a fictional story? Because some narrators abduct us from the start, and worse, declare they will try to impersonate another. And, we, the readers, believe and move forward into the narrative. This is how in the novel The 31 Days, Lino de Albergaria, deceives us, and the reason we do not give up the 31 days. All of them impeccably narrated by a narrator who declares bluntly his desire to impersonate another.

Mário Alex Rosa