Dark Literature and Warriors of Light

By now I'm about halfway through the Paulo Coelho opus. I recently finished Eleven Minutes and am in the midst of The Warrior of Light, which is in my mind a work of the purest philosophy and offers a lovely summary of his works in general. But back to Eleven Minutes, which, although it did not let me down in terms of its gentle, light, and well-filtered prose and engaging story, his take on Maria's story I felt at times to be dangerously romanticized and far more simplistic than necessary. This was quite disturbing and also disappointing, although while I wish to discuss this in depth, I want first to qualify what I write with my own heartfelt praise and gratitude for Coelho. I have, in the past, always appreciated his “simplicity.” He is so gracious to the reader as he spares them consistently from long-winded, pretentious and unnecessary sentences and descriptions. This, to me, is one of the most important tasks of the author outside of developing one's personal mind and life so as to have something relevant to say to the world. He undoubtedly spends hours, perhaps months to filter through his writing and leave us only with essential thoughts, moods, narrative, and ideas. In fact, I have become fairly well converted to Coelho's conception of literature that I no longer have the desire to allow any author to dominate my thoughts with 500 pages of heavy laden narrative. I could say that I love Coelho for his badly needed contribution to the world of literature which, apart from his output and that of a few others, appears to me to have branched off in two worrisome trends: