This "work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness" (Elizabeth Hardwick) tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. 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 one's pristine actions but also in the public sphere, where the two inevitably intertwine.