A Book Review: Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

A well-crafted literary masterpiece that sends readers on a curious exploration of sex, love, womanhood, and God, Eleven Minutes takes readers on a woman’s evolution to enlightenment.

This work is an artistic depiction of the higher dimension of the psyche, in which the experience of sex transcends beyond physical bounds. Insightful, it describes how the sexual encounter supersedes the context of man-made impositions such as marriage and social definitions of morality, but most significantly, it seeps through the highly intimate fragments of the human soul. Bravely revealing how, through carnal pleasure, people’s hidden realities are naturally exposed – whether the vulnerability of the most powerful or simply one’s quest to regain lost power.

This work reveals the passion shared by two people who belong in different worlds but who have found enlightenment in one another. It paints how these polar opposites are still able to understand and connect with each other, ironically, through the absence of one another and the eyes of their own professions, one being a painter and the other, a prostitute.

Eleven Minutes exposes the progression of the main character Maria as she discovers that inside her is the embodiment of various women. Through her journey, she unwittingly finds herself, realising that her identity is not plainly limited to one facet. Instead, she is a complex being, an intricate mix of a sinner and a saint, a school girl and a seductress, a damsel and a dominatrix. The personification of both wife and mistress, a romantic idealist and a practical realist.

But above all, she is a childless mother, able to balance out these extremes. For as in every woman’s journey, she is a life-giver, a nurturing and empowered being overflowing with wisdom, along with the capacity to choose and control the tides of her life.

With literary precision, Coelho weaves together the workings of sex, love, and self-discovery with the realms of fate. Creatively citing how fate goes beyond human will. For all the determination in this world, despite all the love we either choose or lose and in spite of all the epiphanies and revelations about ourselves that we dare uncover, one cannot surpass the destiny invoked by the heavens.

A must-read for womankind, this work carefully undresses the mind, symbolically revealing the elusive personas of every woman’s Maria – the Innocent Girl, the Femme Fatale, and the Understanding Mother.