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Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho Summary Study Guide

Detailed plot synopsis reviews of Eleven Minutes


Plot Summary Part 4

And she tells him she is leaving.   Does any of this make sense to you? No? Good.


Maria thinks something about love being slavery and dreams becoming reality but it makes no sense. Anyway she leaves and gets on a plane for Brazil, which inexplicably stops in Paris first. At the Paris airport Ralf is there, waiting for her.


Maria changes her mind and decides to stay with Ralf.


How did Ralf know she was going to Paris first? There is no explanation.


Why did Maria first decide to leave, and then change her mind when Ralf followed her to Paris? There is no explanation.


The End


Literary Criticism:


I really wanted to like this book. After all, it was about a whore! What could be more interesting than a book about a whore? It turns out, a whole lot of things. I had three big problems with this story:

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1) Maria's motivations are wholly unexplained. Why did she decide to become a whore. "Just because" seems the likeliest answer, which is totally unsatisfying. And why did she decide to leave Ralf when she fell in love with him, and what made her change her mind? None of these things are ever explained. I think we are supposed to think that by leaving these things unexplained it makes the book more profound, for the reader to figure out, but to me it is simply lazy writing.


 


2) The whole point of the book was to talk about what is love and how is love defined. In that the book fails miserably, using the words "inner light of a person" as a placeholder for love. Paulo Coelho is one of those snobbish, intellectual writers who likes to pretend to write books that have strong philosophical meanings, but the reality is that he is a dilettante who writes with big words in a very superficial way.


The definition of love is quite clear. Love is being attracted to certain characteristics of a person. It can be a personality trait. It can be appearance. It can be how they talk. But it is always something. But by shrouding it in an intangible "inner light", Coelho makes the story more mystical and less comprehensible than it needs to be. In other words, there is much less to the story than it appears. A whore has sex with men. One of the men falls in love with the whore, and vice versa. The end.


 


3) I enjoyed the sex parts at first but it quickly became very repetitive and even tedious. I found it tedious because for Maria, sex was no big deal. If it was no big deal for her, then it was no big deal for the author. Sex has a place in a story but should be used sparingly, not on every other page.


And what makes sex interesting is when it is the culmination of an emotional attachment. True, here the sex was the culmination of Maria's emotional attachment to Ralf. But it simply wasn't very dramatic.


Imagine a story instead where Maria uses her whoring talents to screw more and more important people in corporations and government, working higher and higher until she is the Prime Minister's personal whore. Show Maria seducing and blackmailing to climb her way to the top and fighting rivals who try to destroy her and using her v_gina to get what she wants from men, namely money and power.


Then the sex scenes, as the endpoint of seductions, would be compelling. Sex as an instrument to accomplish something else is interesting. Sex for the sake of sex is simply gynecological calisthenics, which is the final reason why this book was so boring.

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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s).
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