Choices in a woman’s life

Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho specializes in uplift. His 1993 quest fable “The Alchemist” was an international bestseller, and later works such as “The Pilgrimage,” “By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept” and “Veronika Decides to Die” padded out the same inspirational profile: stories of people searching for their destinies, for their true selves, for a reason to live -- and succeeding.

Coelho’s latest novel, “Eleven Minutes,” deals with what he calls a “harsh, difficult, shocking” subject -- prostitution -- but his method hasn’t changed. The spin remains positive, the trajectory ascending. From the opening “Once upon a time,” we feel ourselves in the warm and practiced grip of a born storyteller. He tells us of a girl, Maria, from the hinterlands of Brazil, the reckless choices that bring her to the red-light district of Geneva, and two men who offer her a choice between the dark but alluring path of sadomasochism and “sacred sex” in the context of love.

In an afterword, Coelho says he adapted his title from that of Irving Wallace’s 1969 courtroom novel “The Seven Minutes,” which referred to the duration of a typical sex act. As befits an author from the land of Carnaval and the samba, Coelho makes a more generous allowance. In any case, this isn’t a story a North American would be likely to write. It’s too suave and worldly, too comfortable with the idea of prostitution on one hand, and too eager on the other to impose abstract theories on the mess of human life.

The tone, in fact, is definitely European. And if “Eleven Minutes” reminds us of any other contemporary novel, it might, oddly enough, be Michel Houellebecq’s “The Elementary Particles.” The gloomy Frenchman and the smiling Brazilian could hardly seem more alien. Houellebecq’s point is that sacred sex doesn’t exist, at least not for affluent residents of post-industrial nations. All that’s available is profane, debased sex, a hellish swamp. But by denying sacred sex as a fact, he affirms it as a category -- and Houellebecq’s categories, in their dualistic starkness, aren’t so different from Coelho’s.

Maria is an emblematic character, but for the first half of the story she is also individualized enough to be a character in a realistic novel. Disappointed by her early experiences of love, she adopts a practical attitude: Her beauty is a perishable asset; if she wants wealth, glamour and a happy marriage, she has to leverage that asset as quickly as she can. On vacation in Rio de Janeiro, she goes to the beach in a bikini and is noticed by a Swiss nightclub owner who offers her a job as a dancer.

In her diary, passages of which appear at the end of each chapter, Maria writes: “Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life.... I’ve realized that sometimes you get no second chance and that it’s best to accept the gifts the world offers you.” The diary entries are more sophisticated than we would expect from a young provincial woman, but this doesn’t start to bother us until after Maria has arrived in Geneva, read the fine print in the contract and discovered that her job amounts to indentured servitude. She escapes the nightclub but ends up selling herself in a Brazilian-themed brothel, where her life becomes a lucrative but predictable round of role-playing and passionless sex.

Throughout, Maria clings to the idea that she is choosing her life, even as events keep choosing it for her. This willfulness attracts the S&M; freak, an English businessman named Terence, and the hero, a Swiss artist named Ralf Hart. They compete to see who can win her love, or at least who can bring her to sexual fulfillment. Terence takes the early lead, but Ralf has the finishing kick. Together with a female librarian Maria befriends, they lecture her on the meaning of life and love.

Maria, who still intends to be practical -- to leave both men behind, take her savings and buy a farm in Brazil -- processes all this. She is a romantic and spiritual pilgrim in spite of herself. The ideally sensitive, all-knowing Ralf shows her the road from Geneva to Santiago de Compostela in Spain -- the route Coelho described in “Pilgrimage.” But even after she falls in love with him she isn’t sure she can believe in a Hollywood ending. Wasn’t that the mirage that led her astray in the first place? We, too, have grown skeptical by this point, seeing how much of the uplift is being forced on us, held in shape by not-so-invisible wires. *