Rating: 
Summary: Eleven minutes
Review: "Eleven minutes" for people who read "The Alchemist, is almost the same thing except Maria (the prostitute) is not Santiago (the shepherd) from "The Alchemist".
For "healthy" adults who like underaged girls - this book is perfect. Coelho, writes about a 11 years old girl's sex life as if he were a girl himself! Then when this Maria is only 15, she discovers what Masturbation means and the way she does it and the way she feels when she masturbates, is vivibly described by Coelho - the writer I admired a lot.
It's not a child pornography novel - that's what I like to think about it - but it surely must be when the sex life of an 11 and 15 yrs old girl is so vividly described. I definitely quit reading "Eleven minutes" for the reasons above and I was so grateful I have borrowed this book from the library and not spend my hard-earned money in a rude novel like this.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to put down.
Review: "Eleven Minutes" is the first book I have read by Paulo Coelho. Although there were some things about it which I felt detracted from the overall experience, I ended up reading it in one day, which is about as high praise as you can give a book. This is a story which has been done before, where a young woman (Maria) leaves her home to seek fame and fortune and ends up on the streets. What this book does very well, is show the difference between sex and love, and the writing makes one want to follow the story all the way to the end. There are some flaws though, some of which may be due to the translation. For one thing, the absence of drugs seems to be unrealistic, but perhaps that was the correct decision, because in this story sex is the drug that is being used. Another oddity that distracted me was how the narrative shifted from Maria's point-of-view to another character's for brief periods. Overall, these problems are small though, and this book is very interesting to read.
Rating: 
Summary: LUDICROUS [Adult content] MANUAL FOR TEENAGERS
Review: Absolutely boring and irritating... ludicrous, ridiculous and corny. Coelho's [adult] fantasies and sadomasochistic delusions in print plus he brings Jesus, Mary, the holy spirit and God to the bed... sickening! To add insult to injury, you will find irritating references to some of his other books in this particular novel. I first saw this book being sold in the country where it takes place, Switzerland. So I decided to read the reviews on amazon.com ... from the German, French, English and American points of view... some of them good, some of them bad.
I decided to give the book a chance. Only because I happened to like THE ALCHEMIST. The first half of the book was interesting, but it is after the first half that the book gets tedious and makes you sick. Good fuel material for a bonfire.
Rating: 
Summary: A study on the complexities of love
Review: Having not read any of Paulo Coelho's novel prior to this one, I cannot say whether it is typical or not. However, in the forward, he apologizes to some readers that have praised previous works, that this novel is not quite like the rest. Regardless, it is an excellent read. Maria is a young introspective Brazilian woman, who also records in her diaries, her thoughts on the nature of the world from a very young age. Very young by not responding to a boy's request for a pencil, she felt she lost an opportunity for her eventual soul mate. She is a very young woman intent on fulfilling her destiny of one day being a wife and mother. As with many people, life often brings much different than what we have planned and it works out that Maria ends up going to Geneva, Switzerland to pursue fame and fortune. All the while Maria is living her life, she is noting what she experiences and sees and is trying to piece together how life and love work. Unfortunately, her plans in Switzerland fall through and Maria is presented an opportunity quite unplanned for. She enters the world of prostitution. Maria quickly learns the rules of the game. In her diaries, she is concerned about the affect her profession is having on her perception of love. She theorizes that so many people put so much importance on a single act, so much fear, planning and importance, that when boiled down, the act is a mere 11 minutes. Hence the title of the book. While working as a prostitute and justifying its separation of sex from love, Maria meets a artist that professes his disinterest in sex, in fact he says he is bored with it. Maria suspecting he is no different than the others, just using different lines, initially continues the friendship at a distance, all the while suspecting his motives. Her artist friend always comments on "her light" which he can said he could see upon their first meeting when he sketched her in a restaurant. Each time they meet their conversation is cloaked in much symbolism as the Road to Santiago and the significance of certain things. As time goes on Maria due to her association with the artist is drawn into some of the club she works for special clientele and explores a side of sex that she finds intriguing and is not exactly part of her theory as yet. Without going further and ruining the story, Maria's running dialogue in her mind and in the diaries she writes shows and intelligent albeit superstitious young woman's way of dealing with the sex trade's disassociation of sex with love. Her thoughts and theories are intriguing and quite compelling. Her conversations with the older librarian she befriends and the young artist are interesting in both what is included and omitted from her conversation and the reasoning why. Also you are provided with some of the librarian's thoughts and feelings from an entirely different prospective. This was as revealing in a different sense. Some might find the material a bit to risqué, however, given the fact the story clearly is about a prostitute, this should not be surprising. In many ways it is more tame than some of the prime time TV shows. I find the book compelling in the sense that it treats the subject as most people would when thinking about what to do, the moral justification, the concerns, the mysticism about the way to or not to act. There are milestones in a person's life and the character Maria clearly had a sense of when several were met in her life. I would definitely read more from this writer.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: How could a man think as a woman? Paulo Coelho does, and it helps men and women alike.
Rating:
Summary: Reading Old Friends
Review: I admit it - I don't like surprises. When I go to a restaurant, I always order the same thing. After all, if I know one thing is good, why try something else? Surprise parties? I hate them - they scare the crap out of me. Plot twists in movies? I think they're so rarely done well, they only annoy me. So when I saw Paulo Coehlo's new book, Eleven Minutes, on the bookshelf, I knew I had to get it. After all, I adored the other book I had read by him, The Alchemist. I reveled in the idea of curling up on my couch with an old friend - how I equate reading books by authors I like. Eleven Minutes is a book about sex. You can cut it other ways, but that's what it comes down to. The title itself refers to the length of time it takes to commit the act. The world we live in revolves around sex, no matter how much people try to disguise or argue that fact. Rather than dispute it or make sex ugly, Coehlo presents sex as a beautiful lesson to be mastered as one gains experience. Maria is a prostitute from a small town in Brazil who gets convinced to move to Geneva, Switzerland, to become a stage sensation. Doing Brazilian dances at a sleazy bar does not bring the fame Maria wishes so she gets out of her contract and tries to fend for herself in Geneva. With no money and little knowledge of the language though, she ends up working as a prostitute. While Maria's entrance into prostitution is probably pretty typical, she is not who one imagines when they think of a sex worker. She visits the library religiously and during downtimes at her workplace, she reads and takes notes on matters of psychiatry, love, sex and farm management. She learns to provide for her clients physical and mental needs. She saves her money and she has adventures while she bides her time until her return home to Brazil. Coehlo makes an astute choice in having the main character in his book, which honors sex, be a prostitute. Through Maria we are able to see some of the ugliest sides of sex. But it is through her development as a character that we are able to appreciate the beauty of the act of sex. In his celebration of sex and love, Coehlo is a success. Sadly though, in Eleven Minutes, Coehlo is a victim of his own style. In The Alchemist, a book worth anyone's time, he tells a good story that has a tendency at points to become preachy, but the story itself wins out and the novel is excellent. In Eleven Minutes, Coehlo seems unable to resist his tendency to preach and much of the book becomes his opinion - his take on how things are and should be. I read the book Eleven Minutes quickly - I ate it up and when I had to take a break, I couldn't wait to start reading again. All said and done, though, I would rather curl up on my couch with The Alchemist, as it's a much more loyal friend.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful
Review: I finished reading 'Onze Minutes' by Paulo... (in almost a day..)
It's crazy how Paulo wrote about a young Brazilian girl who is going through hardships of life, love, and sex. It is so vivid that it's almost embarrassing. I could relate to it a lot, actually... maybe it's because I went through a breakup just like Maria.
Paulo's writing is beautiful. Definitely would recommend for anyone interested in love and sexuality.
Rating:
Summary: 101 on love and sex
Review: I loved this book!
It is a 22-year old womans journey into the world of sex and her quest to find someone who will show her its meaning in the context of love.
I usually underline the parts that I love in each book I read; I was not able to do so with this one because most of it would be underlined. I especially liked the main characters diary excerpts after each chapter; they were so powerfol and honest.
It is a very easy read and it keeps you turning the pages till the end.A very simple book full of wisdom.
Rating:
Summary: The life like it's
Review: I'm a great fan of this author, I read more than ten book of him, in several language, in this case read this book in the original language Portuguese (ONZE MINUTOS), this book relates the history of Maria, one Brazilian escort girl, Maria born in a poor city in the Brazil, when she was child, she fall in love by a boy, but not have courage to declare her love. The book's discourse about her dreams, fears and the search to find the love of her life; treating with a naked way subjects very hard in the night's life, in this travel she discovers a lot thing very interesting like a business man's behavior, when they are with a prostitute, the pleasure of the pain, and the endless search of the love, in this search knows herself, your body and your mind, and at the same time the wonderful and tragic world of the love. The book have a lot likeness with a other great Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues that show in his books the love, sex and death, in its natural state. In nut shell he told "The life like it's "About the author is not necessary to say anything because he sold more than 1000,000 books in fifty idioms, between his books is "The alchemist", "Veronica decide to death" and others, recently he was invited to make a part of Brazilian's letters academy
Rating:
Summary: Read more than just the words on Coelho's pages
Review: If taken literally, this book is nothing more than a glorified romance/bodice ripper/Cinderella story. To really understand what the author is trying to say, you must read beyond the words. The central character, Maria, is a prositute - earning money, doing something that she does not like, thinking all the while she'd rather be somewhere else, all to achieve her goal of going home and impressing her friends and family with the entrapments the perfect life. Wouldn't that describe most of us? Don't we all sell a piece of ourselves - whether literally or figuratively - to attain the "good life"? What foils Maria's plans is love. A love so supreme, so whole, that it is beyond her control. It stirs her to her very core and shakes the very foundation of her idea of a perfect life. She spends a great deal of time trying to keep herself on her life plan, but is continually drawn to this man who "has seen her light". Her anguish over whether to do what is expected or to follow her soul, is described so subtly by Coehlo, that those readers just skimming the surface of the book, will miss it. Any reader who had experienced the mystical power of this type of love, will recognize him or herself immediately. What's truly amazing is that the author has managed to describe this complex union of souls, minds and bodies, so simply that it's beautiful. Read it once. Put it away for a month. Read it again - but really read it this time. It's worth it.
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