This is something you ought to keep in your bookshelf for another read in the future!
Eleven Minutes is a story of a young girl named Maria from a small Brazilian village. After being heart broken in her first innocent encounter with love, she developed this stigma: Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer. By some twists of fate, Maria finally ended up working as a prostitute in Geneva. She developed fascination with sex. There, she slowly drifted farther away from real love. But her despairing view of love was put to test when she met a painter who sees in her an “inner light.” Maria was brought to an enigma where she has to choose between two diverging roads: pursuing a path of darkness or risking everything to find her own “inner light.”
This wonderfully written novel is an interesting study of scared and profane sexuality in the context of real love. Dealing with a myriad of emotions, the novel carefully and skillfully touched issues on sacred sex and sadomasochism. Coelho’s candid and utter simplicity brought about unreserved sophistication, capturing the readers’ emotion.
Soulful and expressive, the novel was filled with vivid illustrations and visualizations through the author’s unreserved literary expressions. His understandings of sex as a prayer – a way to touch divinity, and his ability to show the co-mingling world of sex, love, pain, and loneliness, showing these things through characters that are enticingly human prevailed in the entirety of the novel.
Caution: this book is certainly not puritanical. Some scenes and moments in the book are sexually charged, hoisting the story in its zenith. This book is highly recommended for people who are open-minded.
“Eleven Minutes is an exploration into the things we crave most out of life presented in a way that will awaken your soul and change the way you love and make love.”
