Paulo Coelho - Eleven Minutes

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In this book Paulo Coelho describes a woman's self discovery through Love and sex. The following article has such references. If you are not ready, see you in a different post.
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Paulo Coelho has the gift of telling stories about the things we know and present them as if we are hearing it for the first time, because of the new perspective he present them. He gives it an angle of sacred, special. Eleven Minutes is no different. It is not taking us into a new world, it is showing something that we already know, and he is talking it into a different height, and enlighten us with the dimensions we were blind before.

I was told Eleven Minutes is about a woman's quest for sex from teenage to womanhood with graphic details of it. If one picks this book for it, he / she will be disappointed! Because, though sex is a part of the book, it is not it’s all about. In the preface, Paulo says he has a duty to talk about the things that concern him and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dreams, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written. His honesty makes it a worth read.

He starts the book with the opening line 'Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria'. The daring sincerity he keeps through the book. Maria was born normal girl, grows up with the dream of finding her prince charming and settles with a happy family. She falls in Love from adolescence. And lost them too. She found sex. And its pleasure. Her life taught her that Love is suffering and decided not to fall in Love. She found men are fragile, inconstant and insecure. She sets off from her small town to the beaches of Copacabana to find life. There she found men who will give her a fortunate to sleep with her. In a Swiss man, she found the 'worth' of her beauty and the escape route to Europe. She decided to make a certain amount of money in Switzerland and return to her village to live a comfortable settled life. But life had other plans.

She understood life and Love and sex there. Also about Eleven Minutes. i.e., if allow time for taking off clothes, gestures and conversation etc, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about eleven minutes! She also learned something more important than the eleven minutes - Love.

In the course of stay she met a variety of people. Those who takes the 'painful' way to ecstasy, to the one who makes sex Love. That Love is fragile. She was terrified when happiness became a real possibility.

The book ends with her discovery of herself and her desires. Which may be different from each one of us. But the journey that she had to find it is worth and it might help us find our own desires....

The lines I read again :
Freedom only exists when Love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who Loves most whole heartedly.

The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon.

Kalyani Writes about Eleven Minutes here