You are making a valid point. I am sometimes still surprised about the passionate negative reactions to what I, too, regard as works of fiction inspired by personal experience. Why is that so? Are people afraid that readers may believe every word and take it as fact? That these semi-autobiographical literary works were written with the aim of providing practical guidebooks and as an accurate reflection of the actual physical walking?
I just wonder. The title of Coelho's book has been translated as
Pilgrimage into English but he wrote in Portuguese and the original title is
O Diario de um Mago - the diary of a mage or a wizard, of someone who practices magic. Isn't that already a strong hint as to the intention and content of the book?
I've not read the book but had a look at the first few pages in Kindle as well as some of the descriptions that can be found online. While some do describe it as an autobiographical account of Coelho's walk in Spain - perhaps those who wrote this did not read the book either - the majority does describe it as a novel or a parable and not as your typical "How I walked the Camino" book.
BTW, judging by the first few pages I saw, the book is either badly researched in parts or badly translated in parts. Just one quote:
As a result, the Road to Santiago was gradually forgotten, and were it not for sporadic artistic manifestations - in paintings such as Buñuel's The Milky Way and Joan Manuel Serrat's Wanderer - no one today would remember that millions of the people who would one day settle the New World had passed along that route. 
. Paintings??? Buñuel made a movie that is not exactly a factual account of the pilgrimage to Santiago, and the Wanderer must be the famous Spanish poem about the
caminante who makes the
camino by walking which became also a widely known song and is not related to any Camino pilgrimage but often quoted nowadays in this context. So a movie and a poem/song but definitely not paintings unless it is meant to be paintings in the most lyrical meaning as virtual images of something.
BTW, I understand that the author himself - unlike his fictional alter ego - started walking in Puente la Reina. Whether he did or did not ... so what if the fictional character errs around for a week in the Pyrenees?
deadline.com
