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. 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 pristine actions but
also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.