Indignity: A Life Reimagined
Author: Lea Ypi
ISBN-13: 978-0241661925
Publisher: Allen Lane
Guideline Price: £22
All families have archives, just as all families have secrets. But not all family secrets end up in state archives, and not all state archives are administered by secret police. Late in 2022 the philosopher Lea Ypi entered the military complex in Tirana that contains the preserved records of the Sigurimi (Albania’s equivalent of the Stasi). “It’s about my grandmother and my grandfather,” she told the armed guard at the gate. When he waved her through, “I feel as though I have just been let through the gates of history.”
Ypi’s family, like Albania itself, lived on the other side of those gates. Which is to say that Albania is a country to which more than a century’s worth of capital-H History has happened: independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912; a fragile experiment with constitutional democracy after the first World War; collapse into repressive monarchy under the splendidly-named, but not at all personally splendid, King Zog, from 1928; invasion by Mussolini in 1939; invasion by the Nazis in 1943; the postwar accession of anti-fascist partisans, whose leader, Enver Hoxha, ruled the state as a Stalinist dictator until 1985; the post-communist collapse into felonious state capitalism in the 1990s …
Lea Ypi (the surname is pronounced Oupee) was born in Tirana in 1979. She thus came of age “at the end of history”, as the subtitle of her previous book, the memoir Free (2021), has it. As a child growing up in “the last Stalinist outpost in Europe”, Ypi was taught to embrace the public statues of Hoxha and Stalin. As an adult she teaches political philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Ypi has travelled great distances since 1979. She is clearly preoccupied by the meaning of these travels. Her new book, Indignity, is part memoir and part historical novel – or, if you will, part imaginative reconstruction of a secret family history, navigating from point to point according to blurred archival traces. Ypi was spurred by the appearance in her Facebook newsfeed of a photograph of her grandparents, Leman and Asllan Ypi, in ski attire, “taken during their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Italian Alps. The year was 1941.”
Ypi was close to her grandmother. She recalled Leman’s account of her honeymoon: “I felt the happiest person alive.” Even though, Ypi writes, “this was Italy, and it was the winter of 1941, and war raged all over Europe as never before”. Online comments accuse Leman Ypi of being “a communist spy” and before that, “a fascist collaborator”. Leman died in 2006; Ypi cannot ask her about the photograph, or about these accusations. Instead, she undertakes a scholar’s pilgrimage through the 20th century’s documentary record – beginning in the Sigurimi archive, where it transpires, or seems to, that Leman was surveilled by the secret police for decades.
A prologue, interchapters and a coda feature Ypi recounting this pilgrimage and reflecting on what she found (and on what she didn’t find). But the bulk of the book is a novelistic account of Leman’s life: from her childhood and youth in Salonica through emigration to the newly independent Albania in August 1936, to her meeting, in Tirana, Asllan Ypi, son of Xhafer Ypi, former prime minister of Albania and chief inspector of the royal court.
To move a private individual’s life story into the space of the novelistic is to take various risks, as well as to court various gains. Making a novel-like document out of your family history can seem like a good idea – it is, among other things, a confession that any historical account must always be half-imagined anyway. But it can also mean that you forfeit the analytical clarity of the historian, as well as the reflective freedoms of the memoirist.
There are moments of great novelistic richness here – as when, in 1930s Tirana, when all the furniture has been brought from elsewhere by immigrants, even the waiters in cafes glance upwards “as if their life down here was also a shabby copy of something else unfolding high above”. But there are also lumps of awkward historical-novelese: a guest’s suitcases “invaded Leman’s livingroom just as Hitler’s troops were advancing into Austria, except they were met with less enthusiasm”.
The real action, in such a book, lies not in the scenes of a life reconstructed (however beautifully this has been done) but in what the reconstructor makes of them. Interpretation is all. A late discovery about a confusion in the archive turns the whole book on its head, and leaves us with questions that the book should have asked in its first chapter. What remains is a rich account of lives lived inside the gates of history – that is, in the archive, the place where we all end up, and the place where nothing is as reliable as it seems.