Romance That Lasts: "Eleven Minutes" by Paulo Coelho [Migrated Post]

If there is one memorable romance book that has left a permanent impression on me, it's Eleven Minutes.
Internationally-acclaimed author Paulo Coelho, or better known as the scribe behind the classic bestseller The Alchemist, have always wanted to write about a love story exploring sex in the context of it being a spiritual experience. The inspiration gave birth to Eleven Minutes, a young girl’s journey to discovering true love in the most extreme conditions. With her immense curiosity and a heartbroken past, our young heroine redefines pleasure by veiling her deepest, most vulnerable self as a prostitute throughout her numerous encounters with men from all walks of life.

She found that, contrary to popular belief, men seek to pay not just for penetration, but mostly for refuge, for strength, for a pillar, for a shoulder to lean on, for a listener to share his burdens with, and sometimes even therapy. “A man doesn’t prove he’s a man by getting an erection,” explains a friend to our protagonist. “He’s only a real man if he can pleasure a woman.”

So what happens when she meets a man who saw that there’s more to her than a fairy godmother – that there lies an “inner light” in her soul?

This is the man she eventually fell in love with, and with whom she must face many trials to phase out her early convictions that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer.”

Though it sounds like a simple-enough plot and not many will see the romantic aspect of a prostitute’s story, I think that her idealizations about true love and the sacredness of sex are almost otherworldly. Fortified with a strong mind and a great self-control over her own emotions, the physical act of penetration does close to nothing to affect her ethos. She must fully submit all of her self, her whole psyche, in order to experience a lasting pleasure that endures more than just the fleeting eleven-minute moment in a hotel room.

Who know sex can be so intense. But this book's pretty much shaped how I define love and its integral underpinnings on sex.


Love, Stace