BOOK REVIEW- ELEVEN MINUTES by PAULO COELHO.
BOOK: 11 MINUTES.
AUTHOR: PAULO
COELHO.
REVIEWERS; KELVIN KARANJA.
FAITH BARBARA.
This review is a duet between @faithbarb and @karanjakev whose websites are https://gatwirimurithi.wordpress.com and https://medium.com/@kelvinkev respectively.
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“At that moment,
however, I felt really frightened, because I knew that my new novel, Eleven
Minutes, dealt with a subject that was harsh, difficult, shocking.” ~Paulo
Coelho~
In all fairness, even reviewing this book is not
leisure skiing or warthog hunting for sport. This is exposing your fantasies to
the world unawares. Of all the authors out there, Paulo is the last one we
would have placed a favorable bet as likely to write on Orgasms, sex,
prostitution, Sadomasochism or seduction, all in one little story that begun
with … Once upon a time ... In this book,
he explored topics that people rarely speak about over cups of Jasmine tea or
steaming cups of Joe.
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Extract: ‘Maria
waited for the light to change, she crossed the road and paused in front of the
floral clock; she thought of Ralf, saw again the look of desire In his eyes on
the night when she had slipped off the top half of her dress, felt his hands
touching her breasts, her sex, her face, and she became wet; and as she looked
at the vast column of water in the distance, without even having to touch any
part of her own body, she had an orgasm right there, in front of everyone. Not
that anyone noticed; they were all far too busy.’
That extract is where we begin this review. You may wonder why we chose to begin on such
an elaborate mouth-watering extract. It is not because Maria had an orgasm, but
the fashion under which she had it _ She thought about Ralf and the cup
overflowed.
At the point where we got the above extract, Maria
was yet to have had her first physical sexual encounter with Ralf. But she got
an orgasm either way! How you ask?
Extract: ‘Anyone
who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not.
…..
‘Anyone capable of feeling knows that it is
possible to experience pleasure before even touching the other person’
Yes, you read that right. The story revolves
around sex, meaning of sex and why sex is not the act but the desires we replay in our minds months before the real
encounter.
In another paradox, the book explores the industry
of prostitution as a sex ecosystem where both men and women search for
something deeper than sex unawares and which they never get because coitus
lasts roughly 11 minutes then money is exchanged. These encounters become a
never-ending cycle, an experience whose artificial face is sexual pleasure but
underneath the veil, the real face is frustration.
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Maria, is a young Brazilian girl, naïve and wise _
a paradox of sorts_. Her dreams were
simple and straightforward, she would meet a handsome man, fall hopelessly or
even courageously in love, and they would marry and move to a faraway place.
Unfortunately, her first encounter with love was
disappointing. She was 11 years of age and fell in love with a boy. For months,
she loved the boy deeply and secretly. She never mastered the courage to speak
to the boy but she always looked forward to sunrises, for mornings were her
finest hour, moments when she would walk behind the boy on the way to school and
fantasize on how it would be like if the boy spoke to her.
One day, the boy spoke, he borrowed a pencil.
Maria got mute. She could not speak and neither proffer a pencil. Love had
finally spoken, but Maria lost her own breath and the words too. Love deemed
her as not ready and neither interested. Henceforth, the boy never attempted to
speak to Maria again, and shortly thereafter, the boy’s parents moved town.
Maria lived to regret her silence. It was a love she would remember for the
rest of her life, as her adulthood journal would later reveal.
That first love would also mark the start of her
many disappointments in life at searching for new love and purpose.
One afternoon, like all young people, at least the
adventurously naughty ones, Maria decides to inspect her body a little bit, you
know, just to make sure her legs are not hairy and stuff. This moment presents
an interesting twist to her life.
Extract: She
noticed a small gland above her vagina; she began touching it and found that
she couldn’t stop; the feelings provoked were so strong and so pleasurable, and
her whole body – particularly the part she was touching – became tense. After a
while, she began to enter a kind of paradise, the feelings grew in intensity,
until she noticed that she could no longer see or hear clearly, everything
appeared to be tinged with yellow, and then she moaned with pleasure and had
her first orgasm. Orgasm!
She was 15 years of age.
That orgasm, she would later discover, no boy in
her dating young life and neither many men in her adulthood would replicate.
Only Maria could make herself orgasm through masturbation. This somehow
disappointed her because coupled with boys who kept breaking her heart, she was
no longer excited about Men and she chose to ignore love entirely. However, she
resolved to understand it.
Extract: ‘Although
my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of the people to
whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my
body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart’.
Her desirous dream to travel and explore the world
was realized when at 20 years of age she managed to travel to the big city, Rio
de Janiero. She had planned to stay there for a week, but destiny had other
plans. She met a man from Switzerland who offered her a job as a samba dancer
in his club back in Europe. There are interesting twists here before Maria
accepts, and within the month, she finds herself in Cologny, Switzerland.
In the entire book, she never goes back to Brazil.
We are fascinated by Maria’s diary more than
anything else. 11 Minutes is one book where the protagonist’s diary is the main
point of focus. Maria as aforementioned was an exceptionally wise woman and
especially her journaling while in Switzerland is an earthquake of wisdom.
While at the Cabaret _ the night club she was working in as a samba dancer _ she fell out
with her boss, the man who had fished her from Brazil and she finds herself
without a Job in a foreign country. However, she had some money and a valid
work permit.
Zealous to search for a new job, she does a
photo shoot of herself and sends the pictures to a modelling agency hoping a
client would pick her out and give her a job as a model. A call comes through,
an Arab man requests for a meet. To her shock, the man offers 1,000 francs if
she accepted to sleep with him. It was a lot of money and she was broke and
broken enough already. She cries in front of the Arab when she realizes;
Extract:
It wasn’t the agency’s fault, or hers, or
the man’s, this was simply how things worked.
That night, Extract: She went to the Arab’s hotel, drank champagne, got herself almost
completely drunk, opened her legs, waited for the him to have an orgasm.
It is at the Copacabana, now working as a
prostitute, serving nuggets of wisdom and orgasms _which she never experienced herself_ to executives, Pilots, Doctors
and such kind of motley that she discovered that men pay for a prostitute for a
moment that lasts an average of 11 minutes. But, in doing this, men are always
searching for something deeper, something they can’t get from their wives and
girlfriends, a connection yet to be understood, a fire which unbeknownst to
them, is found in souls meeting, and not sexual organs meeting.
As a prostitute, Maria met Ralf, a youngish
Painter, who would later, as elegantly detailed in the book _ make her Know God.
Ralf saw her ‘light’, when, all everybody else saw
was an Innocent Girl, the Femme Fatal or ‘the Understanding Mother to grown
men’, the three role-plays she perfected.
This painter alleged to see what Maria couldn’t
see in herself. In her mind she was a fake, having to keep up appearances and
expectations of others towards herself, regretting her past and hiding her real
self under future goals and future targets; which were to quit prostitution
within the year and buy a ranch back in Brazil and settle gracefully as a
farmer.
Maria was accustomed to men and their pick-up
lines trying to “pick her up”. But not this Ralf. He was genuinely interested
in her as a woman, and as a person, and interestingly he respected her Job.
His approach was softly rattling her soul, and
within her, a force was awakening and threatening to prove destructive to everything
she held on to. She was guarding herself from falling in love and with it
evading the hurt that naturally is inherent with love.
Extract; keeping
passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it-which of these two attitudes is
the least destructive?
Things began to pick up pace between Maria and
Ralf Hart as they strive to understand and grasp this phenomenon called ‘love’. Reading through their
conversation feels transformative because their arguments, their words, bleed
right into ones’ soul the only way poetry knows how to.
They are both vulnerable and completely honest
with each other. Unlike the rest of Switzerland-World where everybody “knows everything”, _People have this disease
generally_
Both, chose to believe, that they didn’t have
answers to the questions they asked each other about love, life and sex. It is
through conversing, sharing of knowledge and sharing of discoveries each had
made along their own separate journeys and more importantly sharing of their
individual truths and exchanging small gifts that symbolized something, that it
occurred to them they were beginning to understand themselves in the realm of
sex, without having touched each other or even taken off their clothes to
attempt love making.
Extract; really
important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each
other.
During their splendor dating and Maria
unapologetically persisting in her work as a prostitute, she discovers a new
form of pleasure; Masochism. She meets a man called Terence, a client and a
Music executive career wise. He, like all sexually weird men, knew much about pain
and pleasure and the history of deriving sexual heights from inflicting pain on
your partner.
In their only encounter, Terence employed both
whipping, supplication, humiliation and spanking, a combination of which gave
her an orgasm she has never experienced.
Extract; She
saw him place the end of the whip handle against her vagina. He rubbed it up
and down, and when it touched her clitoris, she lost all control …. But
suddenly she had the orgasm which, in all those months, dozens, no, hundreds of
men had failed to give her.
This experience threatened to invalidate her love
to Ralf and his to hers. Maria, almost became a convert to masochism. Pain and
pleasure proved addictive and she wanted that experience again. From her diary:
Extract: When
I experienced humiliation and total submission, I was free. … I was a bit
frightened by the pain, but it wasn’t as bad as the humiliation, and it was
just a pretext. When I had my first orgasm in many months, despite all, the
many men I’ve been with and many different things they’ve done with my body, I
felt – is this possible? – closer to God.
When Ralf discovers that masochism is threatening
to take away the woman he loves, what does he do next? How does this couple
navigate; Prostitution, Pain, Pleasure, their ethereal love and the discovery
of the true meaning of sex? Because, neither prostitution or the 11 minutes
that the physical sexual activity lasts can be termed as sex!
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It is only fair that the woman in this review does
the ending paragraph, because anyway these details were revealed to many but
ladies understood best … so here goes nothing … here goes her mind …
In conclusion, most of us are like Maria-or Helga.
So, unsatisfied, so clueless yet always yearning for something no words can
explain. But we aren’t courageous enough to talk about it or to admit it
amongst ourselves. So, I would recommend everyone to read this book, patiently
and honestly. Do not overthink much into it, just let that which you struggle
to push to the back of your mind take precedent.
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