“YOU don't have to understand the desert: all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation.” ~ Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"



“Joyce built an entire universe out of a grain of sand.” ~ Salman Rushdie



In a recent piece about the centennial Bloomsday, I pointed out that for "Ulysses", it’s lonely at the top. Detractors are only too common. A perfect example of this can be found by Paulo Coelho’s recent remarks that James Joyce's famous novel was nothing but “pure style” and was, in fact, “harmful to literature.” This, of course, is what my grandfather would call “codswallop”, which I think means “bullshit”.

The above two quotes neatly show the dividing line in this latest literary skirmish. Mr Coelho and Salman Rushdie are the same age, are widely read and employ magical realism in their work. Both authors have received prestigious international prizes, and find inspiration in the Bible and "One Thousand and One Nights". But only one of them credits his sources, writes literature, and worships James Joyce.

Another line worth quoting is Mr Coelho’s dictum that a writer has “a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation.” Let’s see here…hmmm...Joyce was the very picture of a starving artist, a virtual exile from his own country, accused of pornography and reviled in his lifetime (and occasionally since) as a writer of unreadable books. Mr Rushdie is similarly big in Tehran. The impossibly avuncular Mr Coelho, on the other hand, may be the Most Understood Author on the planet. Every Coelho bookcover trumpets his success, wooing potential buyers with the promise that he has sold hundreds of millions of copies in over a 160 nations, translated into over 72 languages—the most by a living writer, Guinness confirmed. One wonders if his business card touts: “Over 150 Million Served.”

If you consider Mr Coelho’s first allegation that "Ulysses" is pure style, what happens when that style is stripped away? The book mainly spends a day, June 16th 1904, in the lives of two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Over the course of this day, Dedalus contends with: his crushing sense of guilt over the recent death of his mother; his father’s corrosive alcoholism; his family’s grinding and miserable descent into poverty; his dashed hopes as a writer; his rejection of the Church; his inability to meet the expectations of others; his friends’ abusive and exploitative attitude toward him; and the second-class status he feels as an Irishman living in a subjugated country, surrounded by more successful Englishmen.



Bloom has his own problems: his wife’s planned assignation with another, better-endowed man; his all-consuming guilt over his son’s death; his father’s suicide; his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality; and, as a Jew among Irishmen, his two-tiered second-class-status. The fact that Joyce can seamlessly tell these two stories through the lens of "The Odyssey" is just icing on the cake. In Mr Coelho’s fable "The Alchemist", a shepherd named Santiago goes from Spain to Egypt in search of his Personal Legend, writ large in the language of Nature, learning a lot along the way about himself and about others. Joyce finds the epic in the daily lives of ordinary people; Coelho finds the ordinary in epic Hollywood locations.

James Joyce wrote four books. Mr Coelho has written more than 30, many in the past 20 years alone. And it’s not hard to see how. One of my favourite games to play when I’m in the library is to pick up one of Mr Coelho’s Reading Rainbow books and read the jacket summary. It’s a total treat; I can’t recommend it highly enough. Try it sometime. It usually goes something like this:

"Thraknar and Pablo" is a thrilling tale by internationally best-selling author Paul Coelho about a pair of friends who journey to the farthest deserts and tundras to find the Universal Mystery of Nature. Along the way they encounter Portia, a singing whale with a banjo, who reveals to them the spiritual secrets that they always had inside them but lacked the faith to read. But, before they can find the mystical path to the Ultimate Answer of Love, they must brave many adventures and overcome the most dangerous obstacle to enlightenment and renewal: themselves. (Set to Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”)

This is precisely the kind of crystal-thrumming, New Agey claptrap that Mr Coelho deals in. Perhaps the biggest whopper that he utters in his interview is his all-too-modest, self-serving observation "I'm modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world." Perhaps Mr Coelho, UN Messenger of Peace, World Ambassador to Literature, believes that serious contemporary authors suffer from some Joycean malaise, babbling around the ivory tower, completely ignorant and insensitive to the reading public.

Personally, I’ll take the modernist legacy over metaphysical masturbation any day. Heavily stylised books are just that: books with style. Give me "At Swim-Two-Birds"; "If on a winter’s night a traveller"; "Blood and Guts in High School"; and "House of Leaves". If I just want to sit down with a fable, I’ll choose "Haroun and the Sea of Stories". Let’s also not forget that every grain of sand is held together by quarks. Perhaps Mr Coelho would be better served in the future by writing something that’s worthy of misunderstanding.