Hm. He’s not really my type of literature really, not the theme I’m the craziest about. But good stuff I read with similar theme (and, of course, easily available in English, as I would otherwise be recommending Raul Seixas and Julio Cortázar) comes from William Blake and Aldous Huxley (not Brave New World, but Doors of Perception, or Heaven and Hell, both of which seem to have an influence in Paulo’s fiction).
That guy who wrote Clockwork Orange, what’s his name come again? Anthony Burgess! His later books are real nice, in my opinion, and somewhat similar too. The Yank Beats, like Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, are also very similar and (ironically) more contemporary than Paulo.
Who else? Well. If you want “crossing the path” “metaphor of life” books, the greatest (although seriously difficult to read) would be [i]The Odyssey /i, In Search of Lost Time (Proust), [i]Ulysses /i, Grande Sertão: Veredas (Guimarães Rosa, in English published as “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands”), Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin). Still in the list, I could recommend you Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, as well as Crime & Punishment.
If what you’re asking for is Romance Literature, Ítalo Calvino’s work (remarkably Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler), as well as Cortázar’s (Bestiario, Historias de cronopios y de famas, Hopscotch) and Guimarães Rosa’s (Sagarana, First Stories, Tutaméia), not to mention Umberto Eco’s stuff (Name of the Rose, Baudolino…) are a must–read.