These are your own words, Paulo Coelho, in pages sixty-one and sixty-two of 2009 published Edition of Eleven Minutes. ‘That’s what the world is like: People talk as if they knew everything, but if you dare to ask a question, they don’t know anything.’ But this is worse, this utter discrediting of a whole continent, this minisculing of Africa, this definition of a whole continent as an insignificant place for breeding wild animals. It’s just like a gossip telling a story of how bad a person is, the listener begins to see that person as the one story told of him or her, without actually seeing the other aspects of the person. This is dangerous, because in doing this, you inadvertently rigs a nation, a continent, a people of stories that make them. And this is what happens to readers who haven’t visited any country in Africa, they begin to see Africa in the way the writer painted Africa, a forest of animals. Paulo clearly painted a picture of a jungle and of a paradise. He saw Africa as only one thing – a jungle full of lions and tigers and gorillas – but he called Europe an enchanted kingdom, defining it with such an exotic beauty.
It startled me, the imagination of Paulo. However, if she headed in a slightly more northerly direction, she would end up in the enchanted kingdom known as Europe, with its Eiffel Tower, Euro Disney and leaning Tower of Pizza.’ Paulo writes, ‘She planned to enter convent, she learned first aid (according to some teachers, a lot of people were dying in Africa), worked harder in her religious knowledge classes, and began to imagine herself as a modern day saint, saving lives and visiting jungles inhabited by lions and tigers.’Īgain, ‘She looked out to sea: her geography lessons told her that if she set off in a straight line, she would reach Africa, with its lions and jungles full of gorillas. But I had issues with it, issues that I had to drop the book, pick my pen, and jot down every of my infuriation.
Paulo’s style is remarkably simply and cloying that it holds you, pulls you, through and through, to the very last word. Her decisions are bold, sometimes wrong and sometimes right, but well, it is life, it is the way to learn. She has a diary where she writes deep things of herself and her experiences, quite philosophical that you begin to doubt her age.
Things happen and she becomes an exotic prostitute in a bar in Geneva. Maria is a young, beautiful Brazilian girl who goes to Europe with the aim of making a lot of money through dancing. Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho starts with “Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria.” Apart from the books I read when I was much younger, I’d never come across a book that starts with Once Upon a Time.
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