The following review will contain spoilers. Normally I don’t give away endings but I had a strong reaction to the ending.
I loved reading up to the very end. It seriously let me down and disappointed me.
Paulo Coelho (author of Alchemist) tells a tale of Maria, a Brazilian (with a “z”!) native who is jaded by love. She finds her antidote to love is working as a prostitute in a foreign country. She earns a living and is pleased with her skill and her income and remains unscathed by love. Towards the end of her career as a prostitute, she encounters two “special clients.” One introduces her to sadomasochism and the joys of the whip! The other special client first meets her outside of the bar/brothel she works at, and sees her ‘light.’ He sees something in her at first sight and requests to paint her. He eventually starts to request her at the brothel and she learns he is a ‘special client’ too. They never have intercourse when he requests her though he pays the special client rate. With the artist, she finds love. She has to choose between the sadomasochistic guy and the the artist. She chooses love over pain. They finally consummate their love the night before she leaves to go back home for Brazil and it takes about four hot steamy pages.
What killed me, was when she left to go back to Brazil, she waited for her love to stop her at the airport. He never did. She had a layover in Paris, and her love intercepts her in there with a rose. GAG ME. Up til this point, as I read that she was disappointed at the airport waiting for him, I thought, FINALLY. This is how it would be in life. It’s natural to hope for someone to come for you. To stop you from going back to Brazil. It is NATURAL to be disappointed as most people WOULD NOT intercept you. I was about to sing Paulo praises for not selling out and letting our heroine live on her life disappointed but she’ll be okay. Then I turn the page and the motherfucker is waiting for her in PARIS with a ROSE.
Dangit.
Mary Ellen told me not too long ago I don’t like happy books. She might be right.
Excerpts:
“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.”
“If I have already lost him, I will at least have gained one very happy day in my life. Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.”
“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”
“When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss an opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of each second.”
“Maria had enough experience of life to know that reality usually chose not to fit in with her dreams. And that was now her great joy: to say to reality that she didn’t need it, that she was no longer dependent on what happened in order to be happy.”
“Everything is important. If you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and don’t feel the need for sex. When you do have sex, it’s out of a sense of abundance, because the glass of wine is so full that is overflows naturally, because it is inevitable, because you are responding to the call of life, because at that moment, and only at that moment, you have allowed yourself to lose control.”
Related Blog Entry:
June 17 2009 – Book Review: The Alchemist