Book Review: Eleven Minutes By Paulo Coelho

A new, international bestseller by the author of The Alchemist tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer ..." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune. Instead, she ends up working as a prostitute.
 

Maria sets out as a cabaret dancer in Switzerland and gradually turns to prostitution by choice, rather than by compulsion. At one point she analyses her situation thus, “(was) she doing this because she needed to” or “(was) she doing it because she wanted to experience something new” or “(was) she doing it because she had nothing to lose”. She decides that none of the above was true and that “it was best to forget all about it and simply deal with whatever lay on her particular path”.

Maria learns about men and sexuality through her various clients. She deliberates at various points in the book: “I have discovered why a man pays for a woman: he wants to be happy” or that “sex has come to be used as some kind of a drug: in order to escape reality, to forget about problems, to relax”. She explores sado-masochism with one of her clients and writes “when I experienced humiliation and total submission, I was free”. Her disillusionment with sexuality grows. She writes “I need to write about love- otherwise my soul won’t survive”.
 

Finally, she does find her love in an equally disillusioned painter. Maria is left to choose between her existing life of mindless lust, the life of mundane ordinariness that awaits her back home or an odyssey of sacred sex along with her lover.

Coelho uses Maria to write a saga of sex and love-making, explores the difference between the two and in the process questions various precincts of societal codes of morality and righteous living. Thus outlined, Eleven Minutes might seem to promise an exposé of white slavery. It doesn't. Maria's experience with the dour punters of Switzerland is as much a voyage of wonderful discovery as Santiago's treasure hunt in The Alchemist. Through the sex industry, Maria uncovers the core truths of the human condition. In the process, she saves her "soul"; she also saves a useful bank balance.

“everyone knows how to love because we are all born with that gift.”

“A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose;

A time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time of war, and a time of peace”

“It is not time that changes man nor knowledge the only thing that can change someone's mind is love.”

“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”

“Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read.”

“Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens - a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.”

“I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body”

“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”

“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”