Its 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writers block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his last novel, and even longer since he wrote the 1968 manifesto, -Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as one of the pretexts for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of a friend, Vaculík begins to keep a diary: -a book about things, people and events.
