Communism under the influence - of Kafka : Kadare's fiction

I don't know why but increasingly I'm drawn toward Eastern European 20th-century fiction, and last night started Ismail Kadara's "Agammemnon's Daughter," an Albanian novel (yes, how obscure can you get, right?) of really odd provenance - as the preface explains (not all that clearly) he smuggled the manuscript out a few pages at the time sometime in the mid-80s (he apparently wrote it about 1984-86 and it's set in the 80s) to friends in Paris, was translated into French and published (I think under a pseudonym) in the 90s, then the Hoxner tyrannic regime fell and Kadare identified as the author, translated into French, the English version appearing not till 2003 and translated from the French translation, whew - can't even keep up with all that - the book is the typically grim story of life within a rigid communist country, takes place on May Day, the protagonist is surprised to find himself invited to watch the parade from an official viewing stand, section C, not sure what he's done to merit this and feels varying degrees of guilt for being accepted - and of course he looks at all the others and wonders what complicity they've been involved with - hero works for state broadcasting so he could have done a lot, but it's all rather murky; in the back story, his girlfriend, supposed to meet him and join him for the festivities, never shows up, so we're not sure what's happened to her - story owes a deep debt to Kafka, as there are many ruminations about the absurdity and incomprehensibility of the state.