I got another Paulo Coelho in the second hand book store in Ahmedabad which i think is fleecing me but that's OK. It looked small enough and I had not read this before. Paul starts with saying how he met a reader who told him he had changed his life with his books and introduced him to his relatives and when he wrote Eleven Minutes which was about a prostitute, he felt obliged to mention that to his reader that as a writer he needs to explore and write about diverse topics - not just nice sound ones.
Eleven Minutes is the time he says it takes to have sex - Irving Wallace had pegged it at seven minutes but Paulo decided to add another four. So much thought, so much judgement, so much about sex and the energy that is around it, that he decided to explore it. As he mentioned in the epilogue, he met a woman whose story is that of Maria, the protagonist, and met several more who were involved in prostitution, one of whom had written a book about it.
The story is about Maria, a pretty young girl from interior Brazil who gets her heart broken with an early crush - a time when she did not take the initiative. Slowly over time she believes that love will make her suffer and shies away from intimacy, choosing instead, to use her body and her charms to manipulate men to get what she wants - like paying her boss. She finds that she enjoys masturbation more than real sex and wonders if something is wrong with her.
In a visit to Rio, to explore the big city, she gets to meet a man of the world, a businessman from Switzerland who offers her a job in Geneva. Money, a contract etc for dancing in a high end club. Maria takes the offer, goes to Geneva to explore life and soon finds out that it is a high end escort service job. After the first time with an Arab who pays her a thousand francs, she finds it quite easy to make money, which she hopes will help her go back and buy a farm in Brazil. Despite the many intelligent, powerful, cultured men she meets every night, she realises that they are all insecure with her, that she cannot have an orgasm with them, and that some of them only want to talk to her. Maria writes a diary where she writes - a man wants to find someone to give meaning to his life. Could be a prostitute too.
One of the girls in her service tells her not to fall in love with a client but she ends up falling in love with an artist Ralf, who is very rich and experienced, but someone who sees a rare inner light in her and ends up painting her. He follows her to her place of work, buys her time and woos her despite knowing her profession. At the same time comes another English businessman Terence who finds pleasure in pain, in sadomasochism, and in his unabashed and gentle and persuasive ways he somehow leads her to an orgasm which she did not believe she is capable of.. For a while she is confused until Ralf explains to her that she can choose to find love in the correct way or through the dark way. He tells her of sacred sex and that she need not feel ashamed of her, nor hate sex.
Ralf knows of Terence but also knows that one must love the other but not try to possess one another. Ralf also says in the context of pain and pleasure, that to master the soul, one must master the body. When we demand the maximum from our body, the mind gains a strange spiritual strength. What makes the world go around is not the search for pleasure but the renunciation of all that's important. Pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only joy: love.
In replying to her question about sex - whether there is a sacred sex, Ralf clarifies that there were two types - one was that of prostitution where people either solicited sex on the streets, went slightly higher as escort girls, or went even higher when sex was used to control power and politics. The other is sacred sex where in certain old customs women and sex were important to the process, a ritual of the gods. A sacred ritual.
Paulo's research seems to have led him to certain discoveries which he puts out through a rather forced conversation with a librarian friend of Maria's. Initially Maria asks her for books on sex which she does not have, but when Maria is about to leave Geneva, she calls her and tells her that she read a book on sex where she found that the clitoris was a 19th century discovery! She also tells Maria about the G spot which she says no one knows - most men certainly don't and she explains its position well - when you go in, on the first floor, the back door. The book apparently said that there were nerves connecting the clitoris and the G spot and if one finds these two places, one can pleasure a woman immensely. The librarian tells Maria that her husband assumed that the woman's orgasm happened in the vagina and not the clitoris which was what Freud and co also said. Since most men don't know about the Gspot the librarian also tells Maria that if they can think of the clitoris as the hands of a clock, one can ask one's partner to move it back and forth between 11 and 1 o clock for maximum effect. The final piece of discovery - that a clitoris also gets an erection. Having said all that he learned about female orgasms, Paulo explains it well, and educates most men about how to pleasure women.
Meanwhile Maria, having found herself and having dropped guilt, having found love, decides to leave it all and head back with all the money she saved. Ralf however pursues her with a bunch of flowers and one can only guess that a happy ending was had in many ways.
Thanks to the setup, the setting, the topic and the context, the book was a breeze. And one picks up a ton of stuff that is useful as well. Bravo Paulo Coelho. He also acknowledges all the prostitutes he met during the course of his research - how they all came and go their copies signed by him. Definitely worth a read.
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