A prostitute’s struggle with her body and soul

BOOK REVIEW

M. Gautham Machaiah

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. So begins Paulo Coelho’s book ‘Eleven Minutes’. But what is the connection between a prostitute and eleven minutes?

Eleven Minutes. The world revolves around something that takes only eleven minutes.  When a man pays a prostitute for the night, he actually spends only 45 minutes with her. And if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phoney gesture of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is eleven minutes.

Many women believe a man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they pay a fortune for it. That is not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone to give meaning to his life.

The eleven minute rule does not apply to all. The greatest pleasure is not sex but the passion with which it is practised, says Coelho. Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they are not. When two bodies meet it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or, they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.

This book is the story of Maria, whose life revolves around those eleven precious minutes until one day she meets a bright young painter Ralf Hart who teaches her that if you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and do not feel the need for sex. When you have sex, it is out of a sense of abundance, because the glass of wine is so full that it overflows naturally and you respond to the call of life.

Maria is a starry-eyed small time village girl in Brazil who dreams that her Prince Charming would arrive to sweep her off her feet and take her away with him so that they could conquer the world together. After a few flings in her adolescent years and with no signs of Prince Charming, Maria decides to go on a short holiday to Rio de Janeiro to explore the world. This is where she meets a Swiss gentleman who offers her a job of glamour in his night club at Geneva.

As she is torn between her small town and the world of dreams that beacons, she is encouraged by her mother to pursue her passion: “My dear, it is better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man. Love is not that important. But money buys everything, even true love.” Armed with this advice from her mother, Maria lands in the land of chocolates, clocks and cheese.

After a few weeks as a samba dancer at a night club, she meets a young Arab looking for adventure and for the first time sells her body for 1000 francs. She now has a dream—to earn enough to return to Brazil and set up a farm so that her parents can have a happy life—and is prepared to do anything to achieve it.

She succeeds in persuading her soul not to complain about what she does with her body and soon finds herself entertaining three clients a day at 350 francs each at the town’s best known hotspot. In course of the days, she meets Ralf Hart who is more interested in her inner light, rather than her body.

Maria is now torn into many bits within: Should she give up her well earning profession for Ralf; Should she work for just one more year and build her savings?; Or, should she pursue her dream to return to Brazil and set up her farm? The struggle within her forms the remaining part of the book.

Eleven Minutes is a beautiful narrative of the struggle between the body and the soul which Maria captures in her diary every night. The book is not philosophically heavy as some of the other works of Coelho like The Valkyries, and makes for easy reading.  The author has made a bold attempt in dealing with the subject of sex.

Can Maria overcome her fascination with pure physical pleasure? Can she move beyond the meeting of physical bodies to a meeting of souls—to a place where sex itself is sacred? That is for the reader to discover.

QUOTES 

• Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds
• My dear, it is better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man. Love is not that important. But money buys everything, even true love
• Those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart
• Beauty my dear, does not last
• Sometimes you get no second chance and it is better to accept the gifts that the world offers you
• If I must be faithful to someone or something, I should be faithful to myself first
• If I am looking for true love, I must get the mediocre loves out of my system
• No one owns anything, everything is an illusion
• Live always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant
• Prostitution is not like other businesses: beginners earn more and the more experienced earn less
• Many pretty young girls let themselves be seduced by the illusion of easy money, forgetting that, one day they will be old enough and will have missed out on meeting the love of their life
• Love is not to be found in someone else; we simply awaken it
• The Universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with
• Important meetings are planned by the souls, long before the bodies see each other
• One moment you have nothing, the next you have more than you can cope with
• Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine
• Anyone capable of feeling, knows that is possible to experience pleasure before even touching the other person
• Anyone who discovers the person they have always dreamed off, knows that sexual energy comes into play before sex even takes place
• If you want to achieve your objectives you have to be prepared for a daily dose of pain or discomfort
• When a teacher helps someone to discover something, the teachers always learns something new too
• When you have sex it is out of a sense of abundance, because the glass of wine is so full that it overflows naturally, because you have allowed yourself to lose control
• When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself
• A man feels desire for only eleven minutes a day, and that they pay a fortune for it. That is not true; a man is also a woman; he wants to find someone; to give meaning to his life
• Brazilians are very superstitious, and you must never meet in the same place where you met first, because that might close the circle and bring everything to an end
• Money is a special piece of paper which everyone agrees is worth something, until you take a pile of that paper to a bank and ask, “Can I buy back a few hours of my life?”