ELEVEN MINUTES

ELEVEN MINUTES -(Review) -If you are interested at all in understanding the true nature of human sexuality, you should read this story of a young Brazilian woman who chooses a life of prostitution in Europe while she seeks the meaning of true love and its connection to sacred sex.

                       ELEVEN MINUTES

In this book Paulo Coelhos saying that like everyone else - and in this case I have no qualms about generalising - it took me a long time to discover the sacred nature of sex. My youth coincided with an age of enormous freedom, great discoveries and many excesses, which was followed by a period of conservatism and repression - the price to be paid for extremes that brought with them some very harsh consequences indeed. In that decade of excess (the 1970s), the writer Irving Wallace wrote a book about censorship in America, describing the legal shenanigans involved in preventing the publication of a book about sex: The Seven Minutes. In Wallace's novel, the contents of the book which provokes the discussion about censorship are merely hinted at, and the subject of sexuality itself is rarely mentioned. I wondered what that banned book would be like; perhaps I could have a go at writing it myself. However, in his novel, Wallace makes many references to this non-existent book, and this necessarily limited the task I had imagined, indeed, made it impossible. I was left with just the title (although I felt Wallace had made a rather conservative estimate of the time involved, and so decided to increase it) and the idea of how important it was to treat sexuality seriously - like many writers before me. 289 In 1997, after a lecture I gave in Mantua, Italy, I went back to my hotel and found that someone had left a manuscript for me in reception. Now, I never normally read unsolicited manuscripts, but I did read that one - the true story of a Brazilian prostitute, her marriages, her problems with the law, and her various adventures. In 2000, when I was passing through Zurich, I met that prostitute - known professionally as Sonia - and said how much I had liked what I had read. I suggested she send it to my Brazilian publisher, who, however, decided, in the end, not to publish it. Sonia was living in Italy at the time, but had travelled up on the train to meet me in Zurich. She invited us - myself, a friend and a female journalist from the newspaper Blick, who had just interviewed me - to go to Langstrasse, the local red light district. I didn't know that Sonia had already forewarned her colleagues of our visit, and to my surprise, I ended up signing several of my books, translated into various languages. At that point, I had already decided to write about sex, but I still didn't have a plot or a principal character; I was thinking of something much more along the lines of the conventional search for sacredness, but that visit to Langstrasse taught me something: in order to write about the sacred nature of sex, it was necessary to understand why it had been so profaned. In conversation with a journalist from the Swiss magazine, L'lllustree, I described that spontaneous booksigning in Langstrasse, and he wrote a long article about it. The result was that, at a book-signing in Geneva, several 290 prostitutes turned up to have their copies of my books duly signed. I was very struck by one of them in particular, and afterwards - with my agent and friend, Monica Antunes we went for a coffee that turned into supper that turned into other meetings in the days that followed. Thus was born the connecting thread of Eleven Minutes. I would like to thank Anna von Planta, my Swiss publisher, who supplied me with important facts about the legal situation of prostitutes in her country. I would also like to thank the following women in Zurich (using their noms de guerre): Sonia, whom I met for the first time in Mantua (who knows, maybe one day, someone will publish your book!), Martha, Antenora and Isabella. And in Geneva (again using their noms de guerre)-. Amy, Lucia, Andrei, Vanessa, Patrick, Therese and Anna Christina. Many thanks also to Antonella Zara, who allowed me to use passages from her book, The Science of Passion, in certain sections of Maria's diary. Finally, I must thank Maria (nom de guerre), who now lives in Lausanne with her husband and her two lovely daughters and who, during various meetings with myself and Monica, told us her story, on which this book is based. 

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