Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho. Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho is much more than a story about a prostitute trying to find love. From the interior of Brazil to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to Geneva, Switzerland Maria goes in search for her dreams without losing the best parts of her soul or her faith.
Some might argue that the book is about good and evil and that internal-everlasting struggle inside each one of us. A few might further claim that Paulo takes the reader into a dark and seedy underworld to explore the workings of international exploitation and sex trafficking.
Wait a minute. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But Paulo throughout his clever narrative keeps the reader inside a fairy tale meant for adults, because we all know that we do straddle between the hope and dreams within or the dark abyss that tempts us from without.
But Maria decides she will not be broken. She knows exactly what she wants. For some prostitutes that is all they ever really want. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever as happened often enough to me already finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
There on the beach in Rio Maria decides to take a chance and leave Brazil with a strange man who says he can make her a star. But first she introduces Roger to her mother and her mother responds as often as Asian women do:. When Roger begins to try and exploit her over in Switzerland as a Samba dancer, she breaks free from that small hell.
