Eleven Minutes

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Paulo Coehlo

Let’s Talk About Sex
A Review of “Eleven Minutes”, a novel by Paulo Coehlo
Novel translated from the original Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa


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“Eleven Minutes” is Brazilian author Paulo Coehlo’s attempt at writing a high concept erotic novel. Similar to his best-selling inspirational book “The Alchemist”, the prose here is decidedly dreamy. The novel decides to start the story as all fairy tales start, with the phrase “once upon a time”. And thus it sets the mood for a story that has “one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”

It tells the story of a young Brazilian girl, Maria, who grows up in the interiors of Brazil and deeply agonizes over her teenage heartaches. She eventually grows up to be the prostitute Maria, still a cynic when it comes to love, but an almost-expert when it comes to sex. She concludes that “when the moment came to go to bed with someone, eleven minutes later it was all over.” Her story is the fairy tale of her journey through her chosen paths in her search for her happily ever after.


Her Story

At the age of eleven, she falls in love with a boy who walks the through the same way to school as she does. They don’t talk, but her feelings are intense and her disappointment at losing him convinces her that love is dangerous, “certain things are lost forever…and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.”

By the time she’s a teenager, she falls in love again, learns how to kiss correctly, gets her heart broken, concludes “love is, above all, a cause for suffering”, and learns to masturbate. Yes, masturbate. Since Maria is conveniently pretty, with a “sad, mysterious air”, almost everyone falls in love with her, and she utilizes it to her advantage. In her early twenties, she decides to spend a week in the “city of her dreams”, Rio de Janeiro. All along, she still hopes to be swept off her feet by the Prince Charming she keeps looking for. Before the week is through, she gets offered a way out of her small town – a job to dance the samba in Switzerland. After skipping work, she loses her job, tries to find work as a model, and ends up as a prostitute, aiming to earn enough money to be able to go back to Brazil and buy her family a farm.

The story is also told in parts by Maria’s diary entries. Most of her diary entries are elegant, the prose simple, flowing, and obviously meant to inspire. From diary entries such as “Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.”, “I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life,” , “I need to think … and write about love – otherwise my soul won’t survive,” we are made to see that although Maria is jaded and sad, she chooses to take charge and see only the positive in her life.

A big part of the novel tackles Maria’s year as a prostitute, and here the novel flounders a bit. The novel tends to romanticize the profession of prostitution, that it seems that prostitutes in Switzerland are even better than the Swiss bankers. But Coehlo’s writing makes us overlook that flaw, and even in the midst of all the sex, he displays his usual inspirational, wise and comforting tone, peppering his text with nuggets of wisdom and insights.


Rehash of the old

Some of Coehlo’s prose though, repeats itself. One of the bar girls is repeatedly mentioned as the “Filipina Nyah”. I think I got it the first time; I don’t need to be reminded every chapter that Nyah is a Filipina.

Most of the interaction between Maria and her prospective Prince Charming, a rich and successful Swiss painter, is also cringe-worthy. Upon seeing Maria, the painter keeps on mentioning the “light” he sees in her. “I like your ‘light’”, he says. And through most of the book, the word “light” is mentioned repeatedly in quotation marks, ingraining it in the reader’s head but a pet peeve nonetheless.

The light mentioned, is of course a reference to Coehlo’s previous bestseller, The Alchemist. Allusions to The Alchemist abound in the book – the ancient pilgrimage road to Santiago, the light, the universe conspiring to place the protagonists where they ought to be, the roundabout way that they end up achieving what they initially wanted. In Coehlo’s stories, there is no direct way to a dream; the beauty is in the detours that the story needs to go to. In that sense, Eleven Minutes may be Coehlo’s sequel to his previous book, a retelling of The Alchemist’s essence in modern times.


Bad Sex

“The art of sex is the art of controlled abandon”, Maria’s character writes. This is a book about sex, but not in the usual lewd way that sex is portrayed in media. Even sado-masochism is given a noble glow in this book. Unfortunately, Coehlo falls flat on his face describing the much-awaited sex scenes between Maria and her painter-lover, which is ironic because the book was meant to make us see the sacred nature of sex and love. It is painfully obvious that writing sex scenes is not his forte.

Cheesy lines like
“You didn’t have an orgasm,” he said…
“No I didn’t, but I had an enormous amount of pleasure.”
and other more detailed descriptions of orgasms and penetrations rival the cheesiness in most romance novels.

In fact, this book was a finalist in 2003’s Bad Sex in Fiction award, and the short-listed passage compared having a fifth orgasm to knowing God, and sex to heaven, hell, earth and the whole of nature. (The winning entry compared sex to a car).

Coehlo obviously did a lot of research regarding the sacred origin of sex, and toward the end, with his story winding down, it seems that Coehlo didn’t know how to weave it in his storyline anymore. So he inserted a bunch of historical research in casual conversations that unnecessarily took on too heavy a purpose. A couple spends a romantic night in front of the fireplace intellectually discussing the two histories and the sacred origin of prostitution. How romantic! An initially quiet and reserved librarian suddenly talks about the scientific history of the clitoris and the G-spot, dumping a lot of historical details whereas before she barely spoke.

This results in some awkward scenes that detract from the usual dreamy mood of the book.



Not just sex

This story is not just about sex, however, but a fairy tale that happens to have sex. Coehlo mentions in his book dedication that “what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written”. Eleven Minutes is most honest when it probes deep into Maria’s heart to show us her pain and her pleasure.

The story may falter a bit and be slightly predictable toward the end, but that’s how sex is sometimes. You may not always get an orgasm, but you’ll keep coming back for more.