I was given this book by a friend of mine and it was the first Paulo Coelho book that I had read and enjoyed his writing style.
The Book is about a girl Maria who was born in an ordinary family in a Brazilian village, dreamt of ‘prince charming’ since her childhood, fallen in love few times but always left broken hearted. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that ‘men brought only pain, frustration and suffering .
She accepts an offer to go to Switzerland, for she had dreams of finding fame and fortune. But she ends up in a night club and she chooses prostitution as her profession.
Maria finds the amount of time spent actually having sex is about eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes. Her world revolved around something that took eleven minutes.
The story gets its twist when she meets a renowned young painter, Ralf Hart, at an expensive coffee shop. She breaks the basic rule of her profession, “never fall in love”.
She finds hopelessly fallen in love. She believes freedom only exists when love is present. The person, who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly. And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free.
I wish to quote what he quoted as the preface of the book.
For I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised
I am the prostitut# and the saint
I am the wife and the virgin I am the mother and the daughter
I am the arms of my mother
I am barren and my children are many
I am the married woman and the spinster
I am the woman who gives birth and she
who never procreated I am the consolation for the pain of birth
I am the wife and the husband
And it was my man who created me
I am the mother of my father
I am the sister of my husband
And he is my rejected son
Always respect me For I am the shameful and the magnificent one
Hymn to Isis, third or fourth century BC, discovered in Nag Hammadi