The Brazilian Coelho, whose inspirational fables have sold about 50
million copies in 150 countries in 57 languages, at times persuades
reviewers with his talent but often is seen as gucky and
spiritually challenged. Here, he returns to a theme first picked up
in By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1996), a tale in which
sex and God are whipped into a tasty mayonnaise. Eleven Minutes,
while reminding us that sex is sacred, is more persuasively
written, perhaps because it feels taken from a real life. Coelho
says his story was born when a prostitute named Maria (or Sonia)
approached him and asked if he knew what it was like to live
without love. The novel's Maria learns of sex through masturbation,
first as a child and later as an adolescent. When she loses her
virginity (at 16 or 17), she finds self-sex more satisfying and
heavenly than intercourse, although she forces her deflowerer to
return and make love to her several more times. Nope, solo's
better-though loveless. At 19, she takes a job at a draper's shop,
strings her lovelorn boss along for raises while putting him off
from her bed. Love only makes you suffer, so forget it. A vacation
on the beach in Rio leads to her being signed as a Samba dancer and
flown to Geneva, where she dances in a family restaurant but is a
prisoner, gets fired, gives her photo to model agencies, trusts in
her own intelligence, charm and willpower, but in the end,
guiltlessly, becomes a well-paid regular prostitute at Geneva's
expensive Copacabana. But is she frigid-or will the artist Ralf
Hart, as uninterested in sex as she, discover the eleven minutes
she needs from the commencement of sex to orgasm (an idea Coelho
adapts from Irving Wallace's The Seven Minutes)? Down-to-earth
dialogue and detail about classy whoring: one of Coelho's
strongest. (Kirkus Reviews)
The new bestselling novel, now in paperback, from international literary phenomenon Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist. A chance meeting in Rio takes Maria to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune, yet ends up working the streets as a prostitute. In Geneva, Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascination with sex. Eventually, Maria's despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness, 'sexual pleasure for its own sake', or risking everything to find her own 'inner light' and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love. A daring modern fable about the nature of love and sex.
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