Starting a novel with “Once upon a time there’s a prostitute called Maria” will surely intrigue a reader. Whoever starts a mature-themed novel with a line from kid’s fairy tales? And when you take the next step to read further, you get hooked to a prose style that is marked Paulo Coelho. But it truly is a fairy tale as every woman, in her own view of reality views her life with this kind of quality, the question left is if it will have a happy ending or not. 
Paulo takes on the topic of sex and how we, as humans find it our greatest pleasure, greatest source of power and greatest source of fear. Sex in the context of love, sex in its sanctity and sex in its profanity.
Coelho takes us to the voice inside Maria’s head as she went about her life and journey. How she despaired for an unrequited love in her childhood and vowed never to let a moment pass by again when love comes around next time. She discovered sex during her teenage years but found it unsatisfying and ordinary. When she met a foreigner who offered her a job in Switzerland, she formed grand plans to become famous and dreamt for a prince charming to sweep her off her feet. But things didn’t turned out as she planned when she ends up as a high-class prostitute in Geneva. She fell in love with a painter and in the course of her profession as a prostitute, discovered the extremes of sex that which discovered by self-mutilation and sex in the context of sacredness
The novel is interestingly graphic that one would imagine Maria’s pain when Terence inflicted her with his sadist methods but also relate with her tenderness and surreal intoxication when Ralf and her would just sit by the fireplace, talking but not touching, soul communing.
It is a novel of self-discovery which seems to be a template of most of Coelho’s novels and makes us think about our prejudices about sex and how it influences our motives and values. As Maria said in the novel: “Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.”
There was also a theme like this on Coelho’s novel Brida where Brida’s witch teacher told her that the “most powerful force that joins the magic world to non-magic world is sex”. The nover is a good read especially to the women who will read it, that although we despair in many matters in our lives like love, sex and self-worth we still have to believe that we can expect of good things and desire them, that we find meaning in our existence not in the pains inflicted by others but in the goodness and pleasure that we are discovering everyday.
Paulo takes on the topic of sex and how we, as humans find it our greatest pleasure, greatest source of power and greatest source of fear. Sex in the context of love, sex in its sanctity and sex in its profanity.
Coelho takes us to the voice inside Maria’s head as she went about her life and journey. How she despaired for an unrequited love in her childhood and vowed never to let a moment pass by again when love comes around next time. She discovered sex during her teenage years but found it unsatisfying and ordinary. When she met a foreigner who offered her a job in Switzerland, she formed grand plans to become famous and dreamt for a prince charming to sweep her off her feet. But things didn’t turned out as she planned when she ends up as a high-class prostitute in Geneva. She fell in love with a painter and in the course of her profession as a prostitute, discovered the extremes of sex that which discovered by self-mutilation and sex in the context of sacredness
The novel is interestingly graphic that one would imagine Maria’s pain when Terence inflicted her with his sadist methods but also relate with her tenderness and surreal intoxication when Ralf and her would just sit by the fireplace, talking but not touching, soul communing.
It is a novel of self-discovery which seems to be a template of most of Coelho’s novels and makes us think about our prejudices about sex and how it influences our motives and values. As Maria said in the novel: “Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.”
There was also a theme like this on Coelho’s novel Brida where Brida’s witch teacher told her that the “most powerful force that joins the magic world to non-magic world is sex”. The nover is a good read especially to the women who will read it, that although we despair in many matters in our lives like love, sex and self-worth we still have to believe that we can expect of good things and desire them, that we find meaning in our existence not in the pains inflicted by others but in the goodness and pleasure that we are discovering everyday.
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