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Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
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About This Book
For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania's Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One's "biography"—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one's individual future. When Lea's parents spoke of relatives going to "university" or "graduating," they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early '90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the "free market," Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world's most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.
Reviews
"The author's narrative voice is stunning, expertly balancing humor, pathos, and deep affection for the characters and places that defined her past."
"Ypi's experiences and perspective are invaluable, especially for politically minded readers dreaming up the future."
"Ypi's memoir is instead brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and – best of all – funny ..."
"Ypi's story is confounding and also beautiful ..."
"What makes this Baillie Gifford-shortlisted memoir so unforgettable is that we see this world, one about which we know so little, through the eyes of a child."
"The book is packed with insights, on family as much as on politics."
"still bears traces of its original conception: under the limpid surface the 'themes' are checked off one by one: feminism, religion, migration etc."
"That indictment of liberalism rings uncomfortably true in 2022, even for someone who grew up as I did in Ronald Reagan's United States of America, in the land of the free, in the shining city upon a hill."
"But it is more profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust."
"Ypi's memoir is gloriously readable."
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