The relationship between Tomas and Tereza is torn into emotional chaos so many times that a reader can easily begin to wonder if they really like one another or if they are just kind of riding it out together. After all the story is set in the middle of a political crisis, with the massive Soviet show of force making everyone nervous and fearful. It might cross the mind of a reader that this couple has carved out a survival kind of relationship, like a man and a woman who were both lost in a deep woods, found each other, and now need each other to stay alive with all the dangerous animals around.
             And the history of the Cold War period is one of tremendous tensions for people in Europe, who haven't really recovered from World War II yet, and all its bloodshed and fright. This couple was set in this novel by Milan Kundera, the reader understands, partly because of his own desire to show the world what it was like when those tanks rumbled into Prague, taking away any hope of a true democracy behind the "iron curtain."
             So it is easy to understand how an alert reader (who has done a little research on Kundera's life and times) could come to believe that Tomas and Tereza are thrown into the mix of the Cold War and the Soviets and the aftermath of World War II through fiction, for the sake of making the novel interesting. You have to have romance in a novel (most novels anyway), but the characters do not always have to be really in love. They don't have to always really love each other as long as there is that romantic attraction, and sex, and the playing out of their interesting lives.
             But it is true in this novel that in spite of (or maybe even because of) the philosophical and psychological differences that the two protagonists show, something draws them together and they really do love one another, and really like being with each other. This takes a reader by surprise during the novel because how could a wo...