Indignity - by Lea Ypi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother Leman honeymooning in the Alps in 1941, posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told all records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan: glamorous newlyweds, celebrating while World War II raged.

What follows Ypi's discovery is a thrilling reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who was the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman, where she met a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And what prompted her enigmatic smile in the winter of 1941, one of the darkest periods of World War II?

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history--and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports on communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi's memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. With what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?

Review Quotes

"[Indignity is] gripping, evoking the work of Elena Ferrante in its invocations of fevered girlhood, marriage, friendship and intellectual debate in webs of family, class struggle and politics . . . In Ypi's work, Albania comes across as a fascinating, soulful place, at once fiercely itself and implicated in wider geopolitics. So, too, is Ypi's quest to understand her grandmother both particular and universal, historical and timely . . . By the final page, we both know and do not know Leman. Yet she will stay with me--fragmented, buffeted by history, eroded by time, but indelible all the same."
--Elizabeth Graver, The New York Times

"A less subtle philosopher--one more eager to wear her academic training on her sleeve--might offer complementary exegeses on dignity, but Ypi's most overt interrogation of the notion takes place at the level of form . . . [She] recovers her grandmother's dignity not by performing philosophical pyrotechnics but by recovering her life and its language."
--Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"A rich reimagining . . . The book is a labor of love and obsession, a search for answers . . . But it's a tribute to Ms. Ypi that we, too, come to care about the questions that drive her to distraction. Even if Leman isn't our grandmother, she is, by the end, our grand mirage."
--Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

"The lack of agreed-upon history [in the Balkans] makes building anything new impossible. Ypi's book is an intervention against this oblivion . . . [Her] disorienting questions force us to reevaluate our own assumptions about the present. As she takes us on a tour of her family's twentieth-century history, it becomes clear that the clean break we like to think we've made with the past is illusory."
--Lily Lynch, Jacobin

"Thrilling . . . Guiding readers to be curious about their own roots, Ypi's exquisite research and compassionate
curiosity for the past make for another great read."
--Courtney Eathorne, Booklist

"A noted philosopher explores her homeland and the family secrets it conceals . . . [Indignity is] a beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Heartfelt . . . Poignant . . . A moving meditation on the quagmire of probing the gaps in one's family history."
--Publishers Weekly

"A captivating journey of imagination and longing, and a gentle uncovering of a deep buried history that goes to the very heart of identity with brilliant storytelling."
--Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

"Lea Ypi goes deep into Europe's forgotten past to explore who owns the story of a life and who gets to tell it. A gripping tale of secret police, fractured families, and undying loyalties, this is also a remarkable reflection on how history is made and what happens to the people who get left behind."
--David Runciman, author of The History of Ideas

"Renowned for making autobiography philosophical, the great Lea Ypi now plunges into the life and times of her grandmother, with exquisite and memorable results. The search for answers in a family past leads to infinite questions--and raises especially nagging and profound ones about how a dignified life is possible, especially when history continues to haunt our time."
--Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself and Humane

"Indignity is a delicate and powerful reimagining of a life and an act of watchful, questing, loving witness to the turmoil of the fractured Balkans in the mid-twentieth century. In beautifully reimagined scenes interspersed with original State Security Service reports, Ypi brings vividly to life human beings making hard decisions and living with the consequences. And she's able to interrogate the kinds of truths we want from archives--and from life--some of which we're unlikely to get. Most of all, it is Ypi's own fine and compassionate moral sense of human complexities that makes this a superb read."
--Anna Funder, author of Wifedom and Stasiland

About the Author