The book is about the story of a little girl Maria from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken. At a tender age, she gets convinced that she will never find true love and instead starts believing that ‘Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer’. A chance meeting in Rio, takes her to
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The book deals with a number of complex concepts like sadism, masochism, sacred sex and ‘discovering one’s own light’. The author has very beautifully tried to bring to us the insecurity dwelling inside Maria (since she is a prostitute) with regards to love and her feelings for the young painter. Also two cases that Maria goes through can be dealt with in particular. One is the negative aspect of sex(however Paulo Coelho gives the freedom to we readers to decide what is negative and himself doesn’t point out so).In this case, Maria gets on with ‘Terence’, a special client, people who pay almost three times as regular clients for having sex and who have sex for pleasures associated with masochism. They handcuff, whip and humiliate the prostitute portraying an absolutely sadist behaviour. It is here that Paulo says that millions of couples practice the art of sadomasochism everyday, without even realizing it, and that pain is something which people desire. It is one of the harsh and negative yet seemingly true concepts that Paulo raises in his novel and though it's difficult to portray, the author has produced the idea before us as lucidly as any other concept.
The other end of sex (the positive one) is, which Maria has with the person with whom she’s fallen in love with. She had sex with this person just twice and yet so enchanting and divine was the pleasure that Maria owing to this ‘sacred sex’ goes on to retain her interest in sex and rediscovers what passion and orgasm are. Here is an excerpt of the context of sacred sex that Maria has with Hart:
He penetrated me slowly and unhurriedly this time, no longer afraid of losing me, because, deep down, he too had realized that this was a dream and that it would always be a dream, and would never become reality.
At the same time as I felt him inside me, I was aware of his hand on my breasts,my buttocks, touching me as only a woman knows how. Then we knew that we were made for each other, because he could be a woman, as he was now, and I could be a man, as when we talked or as when we initiated that joint search for the two lost souls, the two missing fragments needed to complete the universe.
As he simultaneously penetrated and touched me, I felt that he was doing this not only to me, but to the whole universe. We had time, tenderness and mutual knowledge. Yes, it had been good to arrive carrying two suitcases ,ready to leave, and to be immediately thrown to the floor and penetrated with a kind of fearful urgency; but it was good too knowing that the night would never end and that there, on the kitchen table, orgasm wasn’t a goal in itself, but the beginning of the encounter.
He stopped moving inside me while his fingers worked quickly and I had one, two, three orgasms in a row. I felt like pushing him away, for the pain of pleasure is so intense that it hurts, but I resisted; I accepted that this was how it was, that I could withstand another orgasm or two, or even more………and suddenly, a kind of light exploded inside me. I was no longer myself, but a being infinitely superior to everything I knew. When his hand took me to my fourth orgasm, I entered a place where everything seemed at peace, and with my fifth orgasm I knew God. Then I felt him beginning to move inside me again, although his hand had still not stopped, and I said ‘Oh God’, and surrendered to whatever came next, Heaven or Hell.
It was heaven. I was the earth, the mountains, the tigers, the rivers that flowed into the lakes, the lakes that became the sea. He was thrusting faster and faster now, and the pain was mingled with pleasure, and I could have said: ‘I can’t take any more’ ,but that would have been unfair, because by then, he and I were one person.
I allowed him to penetrate for as long as it took; his nails were now digging into my buttocks, and there I was face down on the kitchen table, thinking that there wasn’t a better place in the world to make love. Again the creak of the table, his breathing growing even faster, his nails bruising me, my sex beating hard against his, flesh against flesh, bone against bone, and I was about to have another orgasm, and so was he, and none f this ,absolutely none of this was a LIE!
‘Come on!’
He knew what he was saying, and I knew what he was saying, and I knew that this was the moment; I felt my whole body soften, I ceased to be myself-I was no longer listening, seeing or tasting anything-I was merely feeling.
‘Come on!’
And I came at the same moment he came. It wasn’t eleven minutes, it was an eternity, it was as if we had both left our bodies and were walking joyfully through the gardens of paradise in understanding and friend-ship .I was woman and man, he was man and woman. I don’t know how long it lasted, but everything seemed to be silent, at prayer, as if the universe and life ceased to exist and became transformed into something sacred, nameless and timeless.
But time returned, I heard his shouts and I shouted with him, the table legs beat on the floor, and it didn’t occur to either of us to wonder what the rest of the world might be thinking.
And suddenly he withdrew from me and laughed; I felt my vagina contract, and I turned to him and I laughed too, and we embraced as if it were the first time we had made love in our entire lives.
It is this description of ‘good sex’ upon which Paulo Coelho tries to shed light upon and which forms the cream of the novel. In fact it is so enchanting that nothing, almost nothing can match the expression that Paulo has exuded over here and that forced me to quote entire paragraphs written in the book, over here in my critical appreciation because meddling with it in any way would be simply diluting the literature, art and expression embodied in it.
The author also presents us with the difficult yet beautiful idea of loving someone, but not trying to possess them so as to be in complete harmony. He talks of freedom in love, something which can free us from our desires and expectations in love and insecurity in love. Through Maria, the author quotes-
Yes I love you very much, as I have never loved another man, and that is precisely why I am leaving, because if I stayed ,the dream would become reality, the desire to possess, to want your life to be mine…in short, all the things that transform love into slavery. It’s best left like this-a dream. We have to be careful what we take from a country, or from life.
Thus Paulo has presented us a true masterpiece. It’s a book which is about human sexual psyche and more than that his understanding and perception of love, pleasure and pain. The words have turned the eleven minute phenomenon (the precise time duration of ‘having done’ with a customer) into a craft…a craft I want to know and never forget when Maria says-Just him inside me and me inside his Soul…
Well, I wonder how many of us have been in anybody’s soul. Through the novel, Paulo has tried to impress upon us the idea of sex and hence love. This comes out best when he potrays sex as the sacred meeting of free, unpossessed love and hence the way to feel God. I adore Paulo Coelho….I would love to meet him, to know him, to feel what he does, for such a masterpiece can only be created by a master. And it’s a mystery as to how a man can be so exotic and descriptive about sexual experiences and awakenings, enlightenment, transcendental fusion and female anatomy with such perfection! Hail Paulo Coelho!!!
