ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the romance narratives in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) against the pivotal historical events of the Prague Spring and the Suez Crisis. The protagonists react to these crises by claiming for their own countries transnational cultural imaginaries embodied in an idealised European culture which must be protected from political encroachment. The texts seem to define contributors to this universal European culture differently, however, and present two different and contradictory visions of universal culture: one regional, and the other nebulous.
