A Bold Inquiry. Review on Eleven Minutes - Paulo Coelho

Eleven Minutes is based on the true life story of a former prostitute. It starts with her as an innocent school girl experiencing puppy love and its failure in childhood. This sets the tone for her successive relationships and reinforces her belief that she is doomed to fail at love. With youth, comes beauty, which she learns to use to her advantage. She learns the art of seduction and of making men fall in love with her.

She remains chaste but uses these men to obtain life?s conveniences. In the midst of this fake existence, she has one honest desire; to experience life in the world beyond her small village. This desire takes her to Rio de Janeiro, and through a most probably true chain of events, she ends up in a small dancing bar in Geneva, Switzerland.

You can easily predict what happens next. She ends up as a prostitute and in the end finds her way back to the moral world. That is exactly what happens but not the way one would expect. At every major juncture in this journey, her survival is never at stake. Her decisions never result from a lack of choice. She becomes a prostitute because she chooses to. She eventually leaves that life by choice as well.

A review that I read on this book talked about how the girl loses the moral path and later finds it. This book might also be seen as a girl?s attempts to cope with extreme circumstances, partly of her own creation, and her eventual triumph over the same. My take on the book is different. I see the story as an individual?s attempts to find truth.

The fact that the subject of her search is sexuality and its relationship to love does not make it lewd, nor that this search happens in a brothel make it less genuine. She sleeps with numerous men for money and does not seem to lose morality. That she becomes a sex-worker who analyzes and experiments with human sexuality does not diminish her search for love, connection and sexual fulfillment.

Her experience of the world of prostitution becomes a paradoxical one of complete surrender and analytical detachment. Her honesty brings forth sexual issues that you and I are afraid to even acknowledge. Her courage takes her to the darkest and brightest extremes of sexual experiences that you and I wish deep down, we had. Finally, her purity despite her acts makes us question our very perception of morality.

Though this book intends to give the reader a glimpse of sacred nature of sex, and it does that beautifully, it unintentionally and subtly also delivers a message similar to that of 'The Alchemist'. The message is that any path chosen in response to one?s inner voice is moral and leads to unexpected adventures involving much pain and pleasure.

It conveys that if one remains true to oneself, one almost always emerges from these experiences as a stronger, more peaceful and more fulfilled individual.