an intelligent reflection on the unique shadows of Albania’s past

The photo is taken in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the entire Italian Alps. However, the man who posted it on Facebook is unaware that in his country, Albania, where commentators will try again to attack their corrupt elitesconvinced that they are to blame for the fact that their homeland does not have a remedy.

You know right now that one of the people who will see the photo on the wall is a writer and philosopher Lea Ypi (Tirana, 1979), es nita de la pareja, nobody who is going to write a book starting with that.

“Voy a rescatar a mi abuela de los trolles”when I say Ypi, I read decades of offensive comments in the red (although not all were offensive, even nostalgic of other elites who were not communist or later only plutocratic).

The writer didn’t have to read the leg in the photo to recognize his abuelos, Leman and Asllan Ypi. I told you about Abuela’s trip. Honeymoon in Italythe possible fate of the Albanians after Mussolini’s invasion of their country and a life of punishment for them; They were happy at the moment though.

Born in Salonika to a family of Ottoman aristocracy that communicated in France, Leman went to her native Albania, where she met Asllan, once a member of the Balkan country’s political elite. Asllan’s father, Xhafer Ypi, was the head of the provisional government during the invasion of Italy (he indignantly begged the country for these fuerz “friends” of fascism) and later the Minister of Justice.

After the war, Leman and Asllan cared for a boy, Lea’s father, who was only one month old when the communist dictator Enver Hoxha (a youthful friend of Aslan with whom he studied in Paris) took the power, the conviction of the class enemies, by which he will be imprisoned five years ago and who was exiled from Tirana, to the cooperative in the field, where I am a poor woman, to the consequences of my mother, he had to work hard to cheer, with a left descanso, what I could do in recent years as an accountant.

In Los Ypi, they left their house and were denied a dignified life in the capital. They accused Leman of being unsympathetic to the Albanian national liberation movementat a time when only she could think about the survival of her baby, tormented by constant respiratory infections and without access to medicine.

The harsh repression that affected the family eased a little in 1960. As soon as Albania broke with the USSR, Khrushchev and Aslan rose from prison, the later alliance of the Albanian communists with Maoist China again destroyed their hopes for improvement.

There isn’t a single scene in ‘Indignity’ that doesn’t feel thought out, valued and carefully prepared

However, according to Facebook trolls, the Ypi family, made up of foreign-educated mainlanders as well as collaborators, represented a number of Albanian elites; in this case además, the latest and most famous descendant, the political scientist Lea Ypi, took a left turnwho, from his London chair, devoted himself to writing books and giving lectures to those who criticized capitalism and defended communism, a bloody regime that left Albania with one of its zorros.

Por supuesto it was not so at all; or at least no syn matics. But this is what explains the origin of the book, Humiliationin what Ypi investigates and tries to uncover to fully achieve this, the real reasons for those who persecuted his abuela. “The best of me is when I consider it a decline in virtue,” he says in the first pages.

The book at the beginning intends to be different things: family saga, political thought, historical investigation. According to the author, there is no dignity without this investigation, which can result from a rigorous reconstruction of the past. There is a mix of gender, first person in the present, and a more distant narrator, who, however, returns to the body for novelistic recreation as the pages are turned.

Both planes are intercalated, y the idea primarily contaminates the narrative: the scenes are full of historical references, and the characters contain cases exclusively of large subjects, such as politics and history. “He talks about ideas, not feelings,” he says, quoting Madame de Staël in a children’s scene starring Leman. It is a good unintentional summary of a novel that takes place in this intellectual terrain, where it is difficult to embody characters whose desires, feelings, emotions that are not always clear.

The author suggests interesting questions that are useful for explaining ideas or staging a debate. People without a clear political identity, like Ismet, Leman’s mother, are often abandoned or reduced to a single crime, or sometimes virtually aplastados for careful context revival (It’s the same with the story you want to tell, the history of the family, somewhat obscured by the interpretation of circumstances).

Gustav, a stout and politically dubious figure who appears in an unfavorable light throughout much of the book, may surprise you with a sharp reflection on guilt based on philosophical references. Other characters anticipate certain later political realities with a clarity that can only be classified as prophetic.

All in all, Tirana is a good rendition of the era and intelligent and sensible reflection on AlbaniaThis country is “rare, tormented and abominable,” as Leman says, trying to replace “abominable” with “depraved.” And something else to appreciate: not a single automatic page, not a single scene that doesn’t feel thought out, appreciated, or carefully prepared.

The new volume comes to refresh the elements that deign the archives, in this case mainly those of the Albanian Sigurimi (regardless of how Ypi investigates the rest of you), now accessible to those who want to look at them.

But as the author discovers, A rigorous search of statement archives is only partially helpful: lives like Leman’s and Asllan’s, read from anonymous accounts or presented under a pseudonym, are the lot of the regime’s spies and collaborators, some of their interests and urgencies that they wish to be written about.

The novel ends with an unexpected twist: the discovery of a second Leman Ypi, who lived in Tirana at the time and whose biography partially coincides with the story of her abuela. It is a book suitable for history, it may reflect the idea that archives generally contain few certainties and that they can sometimes only be found through literature.