Part memoir, part fictionalised biography, Indignity is an intimate history of twentieth-century Albania told through the life of Ypi's grandmother, Leman.

Ypi recounts her experience researching her family history in the state archives, and all the uncertainty and conflicting emotions that entails. She grapples with the question of who tells our story when we are gone, and whether it's ever possible to extract the truth from different accounts. It's a careful and thought-provoking approach to biography, recognising its inherent ambiguity, and in many ways this is a fascinating topic for a book in its own right.

However, inevitably this approach somewhat undermines the passages recounting Leman's story. Reimagined in slightly stilted prose, these chapters sit uneasily across the divide between fact and fiction. I would have prefered less reconstruction and a greater acknowledgement of the role of storyteller in shaping this version of Leman's life. It's a tricky balance to strike, and Ypi never quite nails it.

I read Freedom by Lea Ypi and really enjoyed it. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book though. I think I came to it thinking it would be a true story, like Freedom and it became pretty clear at a certain point that this was part true, part imagined history. Once I'd got my head around that I enjoyed it more, although the ending was a little frustrating. It's not that I expected what is a fragmentary and imagined journey to have a neat ending in which every question is answered but the end felt a little rushed and almost as if the author didn't know exactly how to end it. I feel like I want to give this more than one rating because fundamentally it's more than one book.

Lea Ypi is an interesting person and writer with a rich family history.
It all starts with a picture uploaded by a stranger and Ypi shows us with factual and imagined history how entangled, complex and hard human experiences can be.
Ypi’s other book has been on my list for some time and after this book, I am even more sure that I would like to read it soon.
Cannot wait to see what Ypi does next.

3.5 stars

This is a much messier book than Ypi's Free but I don't think it could have been anything else. Whereas Free told a single story, here Ypi is doing different things: she's giving an account of her own archival investigations into the life of her paternal grandmother, Leman (who we met in Free); she's imaginatively re-constructing the lives of Leman, her husband Asllan and their generation of Albanian friends caught between the WW2 invasions of first fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany followed by Albania under Hoxha's socialist rule; and she's reconstructing the bureaucratic life as found in the documents and files of the former State Security Service.

What is striking is how complicated twentieth century politics were. Leman was of Albanian ethnicity but had never visited that country, was born and lived in Salonica (Thessaloniki) which was then part of the Ottoman Empire before becoming Greek in 1912, and spoke French. After Greece was occupied by Nazi Germany in WW2, she went to Albania for the first time, met her husband and lived there for the rest of her life. These shifting borders, wars, occupations and identity markers on different axes show how inadequate far-right simplistic narratives of who 'belongs' where are.

I can see why Ypi can only tell this story in a hybrid format: part memoir, part imaginative reconstruction, part archival investigation, no single mode can stand alone. This delves deeper into the characters we met in Free as well as being attentive to the family connection to Enver Hoxha and the complicated political anti-fascist groupings.

All the same, this doesn't have quite the same charm and force as the simpler and more personal Free - but Ypi's intelligent meditation on how to reconstruct history and offer dignity to both the past and to the inhabitants thereof makes this eminently worth reading.

This was an incredible book. I knew very little about Albania's 20th century history and this brought it to life in such a unique way. Telling the story of the author's grandmother was fantastic and I loved how it was interspersed with her modern day experiences of trying to find the information about her grandmother in the former communist files.

It brought to life the realities of trying to trace family histories in former communist states and I enjoyed the question of whether or not we can actually believe anything that is written in these files. Can we even believe what our own family members tell us? Maybe all of our histories are just told in a way that those who came before us want to remember them.