A
young lady – Maria, that has nothing to lose, flied from her home town in Brazil
and started a new life in Geneva working as a prostitute. There is no quick way
of earning money other than involving in some activities that a normal person
would not take part. The book focus more on what she was facing during her stay
in the foreign city and it is explained in details how she met the guy that
finally became her husband. Since Maria was so far from her family and with
intention to bring back home a sum of money to buy a farmland, even she
struggled and questioned herself the purpose of coming to the city, she found herself
working in a brothel earning the money that she could not possibly make in her
home country. She didn’t have many friends and the colleagues in the club
viewed her as a potential competitor. She learnt French in order to better
adapt to the new life and also she went to library just to borrow some books to
improve herself. The librarian became one of her friend even they didn’t speak
to each other very much. She met a guy, a painter and also a frequent visitor
to brothels, but she was unsure of his feeling towards her. Nothing happened between
them until the last moment when Maria made up her mind to go back Brazil and bought
herself an air ticket. The guy confessed and asked Maria to stay with him.
The
title of the book 11 minutes, based on Maria, is the time taken to have sex
with a client after deducting the time needed to undress, shower and put on
clothes again. (It is short but Maria could make as much as 1000 franc from it).
This is not my first Paulo Coelho’s book but definitely it is the first
audiobook that I read. The storyline is interesting and I cannot guess what is
going to happen next. The book offers a quick glance about the life of a prostitute
in Geneva and how people struggled and made a big decision in certain stage of
life. One of the interesting parts of the book is that there are some
paragraphs about what has written by Maria in her diary that shows readers the
actual feeling of Maria. I took about 1 week plus to finish up the book
by spending about 35-50min every night. Apparently, the writer tried to write
the book in the simplest words as possible as there aren’t many difficult
vocabularies but there are some colloquial and useful expressions that I can
use in daily life!
(442
words)
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