Eleven Minutes

The common myth is that it takes eleven minutes for a man to experience sexual pleasure to the maximum while being with a woman. Though how much we hate to admit it, the fact is that a major part of our lives resolve in these eleven minutes- they make, break, create and destroy lives, relationships, and the walls that we build around our lives up until that eleven minutes.

And the most less-talked about individuals in this world are the women who trade their body for money, and also the men who pay stashes of hard-earned money to experience these eleven minutes of pleasure with women they have never met before, with women whom they do not know whether the enthusiasm was genuine, with women they ever talked to before. The mention of this people induces filth in at least two-thirds of major societies in the world, not to forget the fact that prostitution is, afterall, the world's oldest profession.

And yet Paulo Coelho is one courageous man, as he boldly explores all these dynamisms in his resounding novel Eleven Minutes. A strictly adults-only fairytale, Eleven Minutes is inspired by the true story of a Brazillian woman who is lured to the prostitution world in Geneva, Switzerland with the promise of great money, and narrates her year-long experience being on the job and eventually finding what she thought she'd be unable to find in the annals of this profession- true love.

Just like Coelho's 1997 work Veronika Decides to Die, which talked about insanity, this book raises various questions about life and sex, and fervently undelrines the significance of an effective sexual life in order to increase enthusiasm towards life itself, and how much those eleven minutes contribute to spiritual enhancement of a human being.

Reading Eleven Minutes is a challeging experience for any reader, it opens you up to a frenetic world where all the morals of the society we live in are simoly placed into a backburner, and a prostitute is given a voice to narrate her desires, her dreams, her strivings, her relationships, and her motivations and uncertainties and a blatantly honest manner.

And that, once again, highlights Coelho's brilliance as an author. Another inspiring and blatantly good Coelho work.