5 GTC: (An Authorization Code) Book

This short novel (or long story, as the author seems to avoid the word novel here) is one of those superfluous men's stories that we have seen before. We follow the protagonist for a few weeks of his life, from the moment he is released from prison, where he served nearly two years as a political prisoner, until the moment when he feels he can attempt to get back to work in his original profession (as an academic). In between those two moments he is a Dangling Man. The prison sentence, which is based on ridiculous charges, derailed him, and when the firm daily schedule of prison life breaks away after his release, he just lets himself go and floats around without purpose.
So far the story can be seen as quite universal and can relate to human life in all kinds of eras and locations.
Yet the historical setting of the book adds something to it, and makes it particularly interesting: It's 1968 in the GDR, and there are those rumours on what is going on Prague at the time. The Prague Spring movement or its protagonists are not mentioned often, but notes on them keep recurring through the whole book, from beginning to end. So this story's protagonists dangling is parallelized with the occurrences in the neighbouring country. Until August, the Prague Spring movement was practicing free speech and open discussions, after years of censorship (another kind of imprisonment). Change and improvement seem possible, until the tanks of the Warsaw Pact nations invade Czechoslovakia. After that, a period of so-called "normalization" re-installs the original status quo.
The parallels between the novel's protagonist and the political history should not make us blind towards the differences: The protagonist comes out from prison in a rather disillusioned fashion, he is not full of hope or zest for action, but dangling and floating, as I said above. The fact that there are parallels as well as tensions in the development of the story makes this a good book, well worth reading.