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This book was unlike the others I have read by Coelho because I had a lot of initial resistance to it at the onset. The main character, Maria, seemed too simple, too banal to be the kind of woman who would willingly become a prostitute and her initiation into the field was rather uncomplicated. She never really has any moments of crisis or doubt or conflict which did not ring true for me at all.

However, as the book progresses it does become a rather interesting exploration of sex and the importance of sex in human lives. I found for instance, the fact that most of Maria's clientele were married men interesting because most of these men said they still loved their wives, they were just bored sexually. The women who turn up in the book are also bored with their lives and their husbands and their allotted niche in the world.

Of all the millions of books, films, etc which devote hours upon hours to the topic of sex, sexual boredom is given the briefest of lip-service. It seems that Coelho's main objective in writing this book was to remove the "happily ever after," veil from his readers' eyes. Never mind the economic hardships and child-rearing and all of the other trials men and women face together, what happens when they're just plain bored with one another? No matter what the situation, when people become common to one another they become less fascinating and thus the world of adultery ensues. Yet, there too, the newness will eventually wear off and boredom sets in.

Stranger still were the clients who simply paid Maria to listen to them vent about their jobs, their children, their wives. Men who will pay three hundred and fifty francs just to have a woman sympathize with them. It was quite intriguing to me. I found myself wondering more and more about Maria's clients and their lives rather than her own self-realizations.

I wish he would have paid more attention to the sacred prostitute and the place of honor that once held in humanity's history but he just skims over it.

Maria became slightly more interesting near the middle of the book when an encounter with a sado-masochist helps her delve into her own emotional frigidity which in effect helps her learn how to love and eventually leads her out of the prostitution business. Again I wondered far more about this man than I did Maria and wished Coelho would have taken us into his world. Granted, Coelho just barely skimmed the surface of the sadist world and left MUCH to be desired in that realm, but at least he attempted to showcase its complexity. The sado-masochist told Maria that it is only through pushing ourselves to the very limit of our borders are we able to discover who we truly are. Perhaps we all long to be pushed to the brink of our limits. In the complacent contentedness of our lives, we're all dying for something to scare us, to shock us, to make us feel intensity. Human beings cannot stand being "content" for very long.

Overall, I think the characters in this book were not horribly engaging but the topic of the book itself and the snippets of sexual history dispersed throughout the novel were fascinating and well worth investigation.