Home › Books › Indignity: A Life Reimagined
Indignity: A Life Reimagined
by
91/99
Critics' Rating Index
20/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
95/99
Volume of Reviews
78/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
The award-winning author of Free returns with an extraordinary investigation into historical injustice, personal and collective dignity, truth and imagination When Lea Ypi discovers that a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941 has been posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with deeply unsettling questions. Growing up, she had been told all records of her grandmother's youth were destroyed "when the police came and took everything" in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan: glamorous newlyweds while World War II was raging in the background. What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy in Salonica, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans, through secret police archives and muddied memories. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? If her family lived in the Ottoman Empire, why did she speak French? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941? All these questions were also asked by the Albanian secret police. As much a sweeping story about lost worlds as it is a philosophical inquiry, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history. Through reports of communist spies, court depositions, anecdotes and characters that live on in Ypi's memory, we move between "now" and "then", fact and fiction, what we learn from archives and what we can imagine, to reckon with the injustices of the past. By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity is a meditation on the fragility of truth, both personal and political. Ultimately, Ypi asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?
Reviews
"However, the profound descriptions of Leman's struggles are poignant ..."
"To compensate for the many gaps in the archives, Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, has created an arresting hybrid work."
"Guiding readers to be curious about their own roots, Ypi's exquisite research and compassionate curiosity for the past make for another great read."
"For a professional philosopher, Ypi is remarkably well suited for the novelistic craft."
"History brought to life through Ypi's novelistic style ..."
"If the dialogue in the novelistic chapters of Indignity occasionally feels wooden, with characters turned into mouthpieces for ideas, the narrative overall is gripping ..."
"Ypi that we, too, come to care about the questions that drive her to distraction."
"Confront[s] problems of human agency and historical contingency in deceptively simple, accessible prose ..."
"In the process, not only is the life of an individual described and plotted with great success, but also, at the same time, a form of oblique history of 20th-century Albania is offered, illuminating all its perversities, absurdities and ruthlessness."
"A beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!