Some writers write about books, and some write from books—who read them as if they were maps of existence, cartographies of the collective soul. Vamberto Freitas belongs to the second strain. Over decades, his work as a literary critic, professor, chronicler, and essayist has been a commitment to literature as experience and belonging. In BorderCrossings: Leituras Transatlânticas (Letras Lavadas, 2012), the first book in a series of seven volumes with the same title, Freitas presents us with a galaxy of texts that cross geographies, styles, and voices. With this gesture, he also reinvents the function of criticism—not as a cold instrument of evaluation, but as an act of love, of listening and resonance.

Literature, here, is the tide. And my friend Vamberto Freitas is the lighthouse, pointing directions, illuminating forgotten authors, valuing texts made invisible by peripheral geographies. More than a critic, he is a cultural mediator, an archivist of the sensitive and the Atlantic. To read BorderCrossings is to embark on an intellectual and emotional journey, where each essay is an island, each analysis a bridge. The very title of the series says it all: crossing borders—literary, geographical, linguistic—as a way of life.

I. A Critical Cartography in Three Parts

The volume is divided into three main sections: At Home in the Azores, Memory of Brazil, and The Diaspora in Me. The structure reflects Freitas’s own experience, born in the Azores, educated in the United States, and eternally inhabiting the “in-between.” In the preface, the author states his purpose of “returning to the Azorean literature of our day as well as that of the Diaspora,” and also including Brazil, which “completes” us as Portuguese and Azoreans.

It is in this pluralistic movement that the book’s great strength is revealed: its rejection of disciplinary and geographical segmentation. As the author writes, “I don’t know if ‘national’ literatures still exist or not. A historically nomadic people like ours can only be understood and appreciated in the multiplicity of texts, in any language.”

This multiplicity is visible both in the authors covered—from Álamo Oliveira to Salman Rushdie, from John Updike to Onésimo T. Almeida—and in the form of the essays, which oscillate between academic criticism, memoir, and intimate literary commentary.

II. At Home in the Azores: The Construction of an Atlantic Canon

The first section offers an overview of contemporary Azorean literature, marked by names such as Urbano Bettencourt, Álamo Oliveira, Vasco Pereira da Costa, Artur Goulart, Daniel de Sá, and Victor Rui Dores. In his essay “Do Bar Jade ao Grupo Balada” (From Bar Jade to the Balada Group), Vamberto revisits the Maia meetings (1988–1991), where a new generation of Azorean writers established itself. Azorean writing, he says, “entered another phase of universality,” open to new themes, new styles, and new geographies.

The analysis of Que Paisagem Apagarás, by Urbano Bettencourt, is particularly illuminating. Freitas quotes Edmund Wilson to reflect on how the new prose absorbs other genres: “this half-poetic, half-empirical prose would absorb poetry itself in its traditional forms.” The idea—although wrong, as he admits—serves as a critical provocation to understand how Bettencourt dissolves generic boundaries, creating an “ambiguous and elegant” literature marked by irony and density.

In andanças de pedra e cal, by Álamo Oliveira, the critic identifies a poetry of silence and longing that, even when set in other geographies—such as Berkeley, Tulare, or São Paulo—never loses its mark of insularity. “Almost all Azorean poetry seems like crying without tears,” writes Freitas. He adds: “It is the perpetual existential cycle, the condemnation of shipwrecked sailors and the liberation of islanders.”

These essays are not merely aesthetic appreciations, but reconstructions of a collective cultural fabric. Freitas writes with the awareness that he is helping to form a canon, a literary map of the islands that was once just a fragment and is now a territory.

III. Memory of Brazil: A Sister Country in Literature

The second part of the book delves into Brazilian literature and its relationship with Portugal and the Azores. Here, Freitas analyzes contemporary Brazilian authors (Angela Dutra de Menezes, Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil) as well as foreign authors who have written about Brazil, such as John Updike (Brazil) and John Dos Passos.

His reading of Angela Dutra de Menezes’ work—especially in O Português Que Nos Pariu—is an example of his ability to construct transatlantic dialogues. Brazil appears not as an exotic otherness, but as a mirror of shared and often uncomfortable identity.

Freitas elegantly denounces what he calls the “socio-historical vertigo” of some Brazilian intellectuals who, during the 20th century, “postponed confrontation with their own image” by denying their Portuguese heritage. At the same time, he celebrates the beauty of Brazilian cities and the vigor of their literature.

Just as Susan Sontag said that “reading is the generosity of thought,” the essays here are examples of this critical generosity: they do not judge, but observe, contextualize, and connect.

IV. The Diaspora in Me: The Center of the Margin

The longest and most powerful section of the book is the third— “The Diaspora in Me.” Here, Vamberto Freitas brings together more than 30 essays dedicated to Luso-American literature, from first-generation classics such as José Rodrigues Miguéis and Jorge de Sena to contemporary authors such as Katherine Vaz, Frank X. Gaspar, Julian Silva, Onésimo T. Almeida, Francisco Cota Fagundes, and Paulo da Costa.

There is a common thread running through all these texts: the hyphen. The condition of being Portuguese and American, of being an islander and a continental, of writing in Portuguese about American experiences or in English about Azorean feelings. As he writes in one of the most emblematic essays, “the mirror of our time is made up of these hybrid texts, full of crossed belongings.”

In his essay on Stealing Fatima, by Frank X. Gaspar, Freitas identifies the “lost divine” as a metaphor for memory and absent spirituality. In Julian Silva’s The Gunnysack Castle, exile is read as a poetic construction. In Paulo da Costa’s The Scent of a Lie, lying is a cultural metaphor—what was omitted from official narratives but remains alive in fiction.

The text on O Peso do Hífen, organized by Irene Maria F. Blayer and Mário Avelar, is one of the most moving. Freitas writes: “L(USA)lândia is this land of broken and reconstructed belongings—where language is sometimes wounded, sometimes a bridge, but always memory.” Salman Rushdie, reflecting on his condition as an exile, wrote: “Imagination is the place where the house is rebuilt.” Freitas seems to believe the same and helps us see those houses.

V. Edmund Wilson, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag: Criticism as a Continent

Throughout the book, Vamberto Freitas also calls on prominent critics and literary scholars to engage in dialogue with his essays. Edmund Wilson is cited in the essay on Urbano Bettencourt as a symbol of literary criticism that understands the formal changes of modernity.

Salman Rushdie serves as a model for thinking about the diasporic condition, imagination as a place of resistance and reinvention. Susan Sontag, in turn, is present in the spirit of the book: criticism as love, as intellectual generosity. Sontag said: “The critic’s job is to see more, hear more, feel more.” This is exactly what Freitas does.

VI. Poetic Epilogue: Vamberto, The Reader of the Sea

And so, in this inaugural work of seven crossings, my friend of four decades, Vamberto Freitas, gives us not just a book, but a beacon. BorderCrossings: Transatlantic Readings is a gesture of construction—of a visible Azorean literature, of a legible diaspora, of a criticism that does not marginalize but brings together. It is also the testimony of a man who read the sea and taught us to listen to the islands within us.

Vamberto writes as someone who always returns: to his roots, to his readings, to his vocation. And it is this return that makes his gesture so powerful. By rejecting the walls of literary nationalism and embracing the mosaic of the Lusophone experience in the world, he makes criticism not a judgment but a listening. Not a verdict but an embrace. Not an end but a beginning.

At the end of this Atlantic journey, we are left with this certainty: literature is not just a place of words—it is a place of belonging. And my brilliant friend Vamberto Freitas, with his attentive and oceanic pen, belongs to all those who, on one side or the other of the sea, still believe that to read is to live deeply.