From the back cover:
“Love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer…” So says Maria, a young Brazilian girl convinced from an early age that she will never find true love. A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, but the glittering life she hoped for was a fantasy. The reality — selling herself to survive — is a dehumanising grind that pushes her further away from real love, towards a fascination with pure physical pleasure.
But when her emotional barriers are tested by a handsome young painter, she must choose between the dark path she is on and risking everything to find her ‘inner light’. Can she move beyond the meeting of bodies to a meeting of minds or even souls – to a place where sex itself is sacred?
The protagonist’s character is very well developed and believable, making it easy to empathise with her struggles and dreams. Maria is depicted as both fragile and resilient, caught in a constant conflict between her deepest desires and the judgements of society. She is also a deep-thinker, an intellectual, as evidenced by her numerous “dear diary” moments.
In her diary, Maria methodically works out who she is and where she is, as well as where she wants to go. Here we have a prostitute-by-choice who has extraordinary insights into life, sex and spirituality. One cannot ask for a greater contradiction, and this duality of character runs through her every vein.
Maria’s diary entries, however, felt somewhat didactic. The voice in those notes was definitely not Maria’s, but rather, the voice of a philosophical Coelho. The insights and conclusions offered in the diary are on a completely different wavelength to the Maria we have described to us. According to Coelho in an interview at the end of the book, the real “Maria” (on whom this novel is based), seems to think the same.
She read a first draft in October 2002. She felt that the book was made up of a blend of different people, and I told her that this had been precisely my intention. She asked who had written the diary in the book, and said that she wished she could have written it. She did ask me to change the age of the principal male character, and I agreed - he’s older in real life than he is in the book.
Perhaps this is the sub-theme: the illustration of how humans tend to oscillate between the contradictions of life in their internal struggles. This is my third Coelho book, and it is another work which features his favoured overarching theme of transformational self-discovery.
As a man, I feel the novel could be better if Maria’s diary was more consistent with her character. As a woman reading this? I really wouldn’t know. My experience, however, leads me to conclude that this is perhaps why so many women are super-fans of Paulo Coelho. He seems to know quite a bit about how women think, and perhaps this is why he resonates so well with their kind. Are Maria’s thoughts written in her diary on-target? After all, the “real” Maria did say that she wished she had written the diary because…does she think that way?
For the male mind: this is a Pretty Woman (1990) story, but the philosopher’s cut. For the female mind? These just might be your standard, everyday thoughts put to paper by a master craftsman with enviable insights into the female psyche. Either way, it made for a thoroughly enjoyable read.