Paulo Coelho's attack on Ulysses insults readers

Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion, just as I am entitled to think Coelho's work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysticism with slightly less intellect, empathy and verbal dexterity than the week-old camembert I threw out yesterday. 

But the attack is, inadvertently, interesting.Coelho gives the game away when he brags that he is "modern" because he can "make the difficult seem easy". I think it's an ethical as well as a literary proposition that anything that aspires to make the world and the people in it less complex, less paradoxical, less multifarious, is a kind of dirty little libel on reality.

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