Lea Ypi

After my finished a previous 24.5 hour long audiobook, I found myself frozen and indecisive on what audiobook to read next. Eventually I tried this from a recommendation, and one-minute in the sample I was struck and sold.

Ypi wrote a powerful memoir on Albania, read terrifically on audio. She opens the book hugging a statue of Josef Stalin in Tirana, Albania in 1989. She was eleven. The Communist regime would collapse in 1990, and the country break down into civil war in 1997, after an show more economic crash.

The novel is especially powerful because of how well Ypi presents her fully indoctrinated 11-year-old self, trying to understand her parent's restraint in their love of heroic dictator Enver Hoxha, who had tied in 1985. She later spent puberty experiencing Albania's post-socialist failed economic state. She notes that first Albanians could not leave the country because the government would not let them. Then, once Enver's posthumous government collapsed, they couldn't leave because no one wanted desperate Albanian economic refugees.

Today she is a philosopher, and she uses her book to explore the meaning of freedom within the context of these socialist and democratic failures in Albania. But that is all quietly woven within, until the afterward. Until then we just get an enjoyable, if striking, eye-opening memoir. I was into it the whole way on audio.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/384249#9194984 show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/free-coming-of-age-at-the-end-of-history-by-lea-...

Autobiography of an Albanian academic, writing about her childhood in totalitarian Albania and the eventual transition to democracy. I have been to Albania a few times, starting in 2004, and the Hoxha regime is now marketed as somewhat kitschy; this first person account reminds us of how all-enveloping the ideologically-driven police state was. I remember some very lefty acquaintances in the 1980s singing the show more praises of the motivation of the Albanian volunteers building railways for the workers’ paradise; now that we know the truth, it’s all pretty revolting.

Childhood is childhood wherever you are, of course, but the cycle of school and family, indoctrination and mild subversion, was specific to Eastern Europe and particularly odd in Albania. Lea Ypi grew up knowing that her great-grandfather had had the same name as a pre-Communist Prime Minister, but was taught to insist that it was just a coincidence; only after the end of the old regime did she learn that in fact Xhafer Ypi was her great-grandfather, and that this element of ‘biography’ had followed her father throughout his career.

Then change came at breakneck speed, and her parents became political activists, her father even serving a term as a somewhat detached MP for the Democratic Party. Her cosmopolitan grandmother, however, had always encouraged her to keep an eye on the rest of the world, and after the economic collapse of 1997, she left to study philosophy abroad.

This isn’t a travelogue around the physical geography of Albania, but it’s a great guide to the psychology of an entire country forced to survive on lies for forty years, and the aftermath, told through an intensely personal lens. Strongly recommended. show less

"I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin".

Lea Ypi was 11 in December 1990 when she came across a protest on her way home from school, ran to safety to a bust of Stalin in the park, hugged him and then discovered his head was missing. So opens a story of growing up in a strange period when everything she ever learned is changing by the day, of trying to understand the conflicted responses of her teacher, her parents and grandmother, of learning about show more the real history of her family and the country where she was born. This includes the discovery that her family is indeed related to Xhafer Ypi, an Albanian politician between the wars, after independence from the Ottoman empire and before Communism.

This memoir is beautifully written with warmth and wit. Ypi now lives in London and wrote this in English - she has also produced an Albanian language version but apparently it is rather different as writing about her memories in her native tongue, the language that conversations really happened in, was much more emotional and challenging, so readers in English are reading the story with a certain distance of perspective.

Unlike many memoirs of Communism published in the West, this is not a story of escaping the evils of communism - perhaps it is more about trying to make some sense of the experiences of the author, her family and friends. The collapse of Communism and the restoration of political and economic liberalism and capitalism in Albania and across Europe, following the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985, bring new challenges. Lea Ypi's parents are active in the new politics, and her father becomes an MP, but some people who have come to Albania to offer political and financial advice on transition turn out to be crooks selling pyramid schemes in which Albanians lose their savings. A state of emergency, a declaration of military rule and a civil war will follow. Ypi's mum goes to Italy with her brother. Tragedy strikes for several school friends.

Lea Ypi left Albania in 1997 to study in Italy, and is now Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics - her subjects include Marxism and socialism, still perhaps trying to explore the possibilities of what could have been.

Thank you to Netgalley for granting me a review egalley of the book, though I actually borrowed and read a hardback copy from the library. There are no illustrations in the book - perhaps as the author left Albania in a small boat like her mother before her, she doesn't actually have any photographs that could have been used. An abridged version was also broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and it was hearing this that made me want to read the whole book. show less

Free is a memoir of author Lea Ypi’s life in Albania in the ‘80s and ‘90s—before and after the fall of communism in what was once Europe’s most isolated state. I knew shamefully little about Albanian history before picking up this book, but Ypi proves an engaging and thoughtful guide. It’s a difficult thing, to write from the perspective of your 5-year-old or 11-year-old self, and to let hindsight and adult knowledge inform but not skew that perspective, but Ypi manages it with show more aplomb. She’s also dryly funny throughout, taking aim both at the Hoxha regime and the “structural reforms” of the World Bank; at the authoritarian regimes which won’t let people out, and the democratic West which won’t let people in. An engrossing blend of cultural and political critique with some very personal reckonings. show less