Eleven Minutes (Paperback)

Sometimes a writer thinks that he's flowing with genius and ideas, and that merely basing a story on a real life event would create a masterpiece. well, i thinks it's time they stopped doing it and people stopped canonizing unworthy so-called writers.
this is the second book of Coelho that i've read and it hadn't fail me in disappointment. Obviously, from his afterword, it's evident he's thinking he's doing something earth-shattering and ground-breaking by writing about sex and prostitution.... but you know what dude? Marquis de Sade had written about it wayyyyy before you were conceived and it's called libertine literature. and he had the bravery to portray it as real as it was, and not put on a spiritual spin on it as you did.
this book was a complete waste of time and i should have dropped it but i didn't want to add one more to my rising pile, so i bit down my anger and finished it.
the fact that he wrote it as if he was a woman and he could understand women angered me beyond my limit. there's no realism in this book whatsoever, like no mention of a week off cuz of monthly period.
it was a basic trope, falling in love with a prostitute, as Shakespeare did, and so many other unfortunate men, and the story of the whore's redemption and regaining her "light".
what a load of crap!
i should have put this book down when i saw it was opening with scripture.

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A great book to read. But not for people with a conservative mindset. As it chronicles a part of a prostitute's life, the readers need to be prepared.
I have read it to understand the psychology of the prostitute, how she thinks, how she sees the world, her life, reason why people like her become bound to choose such odd jobs, and most importantly how she stays a virgin being a prostitute. Yes, here, actually the prostitute, Maria, had a virgin soul. And she preserved it for the person she was made for. I highly recommend this book for those who are interested to know about different people of different psychologies, ways of thinking, lives, professions. It will also allow us to know the lives of those regular customers to the prostitutes , their psychologies, their reasons to go there to have relaxation, and so on.

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The story was pretty straightforward, I think Paulo Coelho wanted to keep it simple(the way it should be), with no fancy thriller. Overall, I liked it. Rearders need to be open-minded as it's a story of a prostitute. I don't know why some people are yelling "it's full of sexual content", dude it's a story of a prostitute, didn't you check what you were buying? Anyway.

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I wouldn't recommend this book to just anyone because of it' explicit sexual content. It's about a young women who falls in love and then is heart broken over and over again every time she falls in love. So she decided not to fall in love. She becomes a prostitute and makes good money and never falls in love with any of her clients. She finally meets an artist that is drawn to her, he knows what she does and yet wants her to teach him to find love again. They discover it together. It has a happy ending but, it's not the type of story you hear about. It's based on true events. There is one part in the book that I particularly liked, "I have reached the conclusion that sex has come to be used as some kind of drug: in order to escape reality, to forget about problems, to relax. And like all drugs, this is a harmful and destructive practice. If a person wants to take drugs, in the form of sex or whatever, that's their problem; the consequences of their actions will be better or worse depending on the choices they make. But if we are talking in terms of making progress in life, we must understand that 'good enough' is very different from 'best.'" I think in today's world sex is getting to familiar with all of us. We need to make it sacred again.

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Eleven Minutes (Portuguese: Onze Minutos) is a 2003 novel by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho based on the experiences of a young Brazilian prostitute called Maria, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer....". When a chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, she dreams of finding fame and fortune yet ends up working as a prostitute.

As Maria drifts further away from love, she develops a fascination with sex. But when she meets a handsome young painter she finds she must choose between pursuing a dark path of sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything for the possibility of sacred sex; sex in the context of love.

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