A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover-these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. Kundera's first since -The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.- In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel -the unbearable lightness of being- not only as the consequence of our private actions, but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine
