I read, for these days, our Paulo Coelho saying that the whole Ulysses comes down to a tweet. It seems he made the statement in 2012. The book, to whom does not know, is almost unanimous in criticism. Our Folha de S. Paulo, for example, gave it the title of the greatest novel of the twentieth century. I confess: I am traumatized by Ulysses; a few years ago, I abandoned him on page 400. During the reading, I was tortured, from the beginning thinking of closing it; however, always granting one hundred new pages of credit to the author. Then I closed it, very angry and convinced: “this is not literature”. So I took something from Dostoevsky. It was really good years ago. And today I am rethinking: whenever I find myself convinced, I soon see myself an idiot. Ulysses is literature. I did not go back to the book, but I am sure it is, and that I just could not read it. “The book says nothing…” — says a lot. Leopold Bloom is despicable, that’s right. But how many are not? I think of Eça. Much has already been taxed the characters of Eça as frivolous. I look around. Literature is also the art of language. What about Eça and James Joyce in this regard? And I come back: what more reality looks like: frivolous or impregnated with meaning, almost bursting with meaning? Do people spend their days in banalities, dying like flies, or do they make history Monday through Friday? Do they perform useless functions or mark epoch every day? So I think of my texts: tragics, of fierce moralism. Am I not the opposite of Eça, the opposite of Joyce, and who knows, the opposite of an artist?

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