Thus outlined, Eleven Minutes might seem to promise an exposé of white slavery. She runs off to Rio where she is tricked into going as a 'dancer' to Geneva. The heroine, Maria, is a surpassingly beautiful virgin from the Brazilian back-country. This is a novel, we are warned, that will deal with 'a subject that is harsh, difficult, shocking': the international crime of 'people trafficking'. He apologises to his devoted readers in a chatty foreword. (Wise men like you know who.)Įleven Minutes departs somewhat from the Coelho formula. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds', and 'It is the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary only wise men are able to understand them'. His narratives are larded with such nuggets of higher toshery as: 'Life moves very fast. Coelho's usual plot is the quest in which an ingenuous hero or heroine (usually of the lower orders) discovers the meaning of life. Look for the symbolic meanings of the great religions of the world, he was instructed. Masters of simplicity, all of them.Ĭoelho was, he tells us, directed into the path of fiction by a mysterious old geezer who appeared to him out of the ether on a tourist visit to Dachau. Simplicity has something to do with it among his cited sources are Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and the parables of our Lord. His native Portuguese slips easily into English. In fact, there are more things that the novel enunciates.Coelho's first (and biggest) hit, The Alchemist, chronicled a search for the 'universal language'.

Maria the central character of the novel calculated that it takes exact eleven minutes to indulge in sexual activity. ‘Eleven Minutes’ the title or the time is referred to the state to have sex. Eleven minutes declare the life philosophies and how one gains the ultimate meaning of life by experiences.

The book Eleven Minutes is written by the best selling author Paulo Coelho in Portuguese language and was translated by Margaret Jull Costa in the year 2003. The same has been brought about in this novel. I admit that it wasn’t the best of the topics to write upon, but whatever Paulo Coelho writes about, no matter how undiscussed, trivial or gross, turns into a beautiful art of fiction and more. The author has somehow interlinked the brilliance of the mind with the desire of the body in a book which goes beyond the meaning of ‘fiction’ and tries to answer deeper existential questions. While this book is a story of a young woman who works as a prostitute, it goes on a complete intellectual level which is found in the pages of her diary. Never have I ever read something which made me think about things like meeting of souls, pure desire without getting intimate or the existence of an inner light.

Paulo coelho eleven minutes review