Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Book Review: Eleven Minutes - Paulo Coelho

It has been a while since I’ve finished reading the book, yet it is still haunting me. It is not a book you read and forget within a couple of days. Through this book, one knows too much about a world they barely heard about before. Maria, a young lady, has chosen to be a prostitute. Shortly before I started reading this novel, I used to believe that women do not choose to be prostitutes; life forces them to be so. But now, I started to think that, at some point, they had the freedom to quit and liberate themselves; yet, they never did. They preferred to remain slaves to easy money. Maria, however, quitted, and that is what is so unique about her. Maria has set a deadline and was brave enough to not give up. She was unique in every possible way. Being a prostitute has never stopped her from being a cultivated and honorable woman. She never lost respect of herself though. Persons who have not read the novel or have read half of it perceive it as a sex book. I would say that only dirty minds and poor souls would think of it this way. Symbolism is quite present in the novel and every little detail is highly significant. It is an analysis of human beings and their psychology. It proves that love can exist without sex and that sex can be performed without being felt. This book shows that all human beings secretly want to be loved, feel protected and cared about. Maria was seeking freedom in love and wanted to demonstrate that falling in love liberates humans from all boundaries and does not tie them like some people think. She believed that while reaching the limits, one gets to know themselves and it is not in fear that human beings will discover their strengths. People know everything about their weaknesses but little thing about their strengths.  Fewer are the ones who reached the point where being strong is their only choice. At that moment of their lives, they will know what they are truly capable of doing and figure out that, actually,  nothing can stop them.




Abir Mars

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