Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

"This is a memoir set in a Ypi’s native Albania in the 90s when, after the fall of the Berlin wall, everything was crumbling. Albania, which I knew very little about until I read this book, was pretty much the most extreme communist state in Europe. The place pretty much out Stalin-ed Russia. It was really cut off from the rest of the world as a result and so an utterly unique and bizarre place to grow up, as Ypi did. Of course, she didn’t see it that way because she was indoctrinated from birth. To her it was home, normal, and all was well—except soon she starts to pick up on certain things that don’t quite add up somehow, certain tensions; her questions get responses that don’t quite satisfy her growing mind… And then suddenly—really suddenly—the country opened up. Democracy arrived! People could vote! Go to church! Do whatever they wanted! And it was great. Or was it? Problems soon came, money ran out, violence erupted; there was mass disillusionment. ‘Freedom,’ it seemed, was not that great after all. That’s a massive simplification, of course, which doesn’t do justice to the fact that Free does all the things you could ask of a family memoir plus at least one hundred more. You’ve got the finely drawn family portraits, the novelistic reimaginings of dialogue, the master antagonisms of history—and History with a capital ‘H’, because the backdrop here is its epic end—apparently unremarkable subject matter (like Stepanova, the young Ypi, whose perspective dominates the early parts of the book, bemoans the lack of family heroes), the constantly shifting perspective as the writer learns more, asks more questions—different, more complicated, dangerous questions… Basically: all the things I’ve talked about above. And then you add things like humour and so much local, idiosyncratic detail (there’s a scene in the early chapters about how the school kids go, daily, to harass biscuit factory workers until they get what they want), which you soon realise is just another tiny fragment of the greater project of the book: a soul-searching exploration—an inquisition, even—into the meaning of freedom. Whether or not you can laugh, especially at authority, or have as many biscuits as you want of whatever brand you want, they’re degrees of the same thing that dictates whether you can vote, stay or leave a country, study what you want to, not be persecuted or executed for your beliefs; in short, whether or not you’re free to grow up to live the life you want to with the people you want to. The moving and quirky naivety of the young Ypi at the book’s beginning is a perfect counterweight to the vast and troubling historical period. It’s a very different book, but in that respect it kind of reminded me of Lorenza Mazzetti’s novel Il cielo cade (just reissued in a fresh translation by Livia Franchini, as The Sky is Falling ), in which Mazzetti’s memories of her own childhood during the Second World War are slightly fictionalized and narrated by Penny, who’s too young to really know what’s going on although she really wants to—or maybe thinks she wants to, because she can’t fathom the magnitude of the truth. I think that kind of juxtaposition of ‘little’ questing voice and large, gnarly subject matter plays really well as a reading experience. And it kind of captures the essence of the genre: that there are always more questions to ask, it’s just a matter of looking at things through fresh eyes and being brave enough to ask them… or maybe young enough not to fully understand the potential consequences."

"I’m probably just speaking for myself here, but I’ve had it with memoir . We’ve had so many of them that the retreat to first person experience feels a bit old and tired to me. It served a purpose; it was very important, but I wasn’t queuing up to love this book. And I was just totally blown away by it. It’s extraordinary. Again, it’s partly because it is such a fantastic story. Albania was one of the last redoubts of Stalinist communism. China had made modifications, even Russia had given up on it, and Albania just carried on. It was such a secret place. From the island of Corfu, you could look across to Albania. I remember seeing lorries and thinking, ‘Who’s driving that lorry? What are their lives like?’ It was an extraordinary place—slap bang in the middle of Europe. Lea Ypi writes about being a very precocious, talented little girl who is determined to be the best Stalinist pioneer that you could possibly have: she does more cleaning, she collects more rubbish. She’s the perfect little communist. She thinks that her parents are a huge embarrassment. They’re backsliders, they’ve not got with the program, something has gone wrong. There’s also this other embarrassment, which is that the prime minister who handed over Albania to the Italian fascist government during the war happens to have the same surname as her. She has to keep on telling her classmates, ‘No, it’s nothing to do with us, it’s another Ypi’. Her grandmother speaks to her in French. She always thinks, ‘That’s funny, why does Granny speak in French? Everybody else speaks Albanian.’ It’s her grandmother’s aristocratic heritage; she was educated all around the world. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Gradually Lea Ypi learns that she has grown up in a family that is very out of favour. She’s very good at doing a child’s gradual dawning of what’s happening. By 1990, when things in Albania are becoming more liberal, her parents start to talk a bit more. And she suddenly realizes the whole story, the awfulness of what’s been going on. She comes from a family of dissidents and her parents have been highly critical of the regime. They are enemies of the regime and that is why they’ve been stuck doing dead-end jobs and why, despite their obvious intelligence and education, they’ve led a very difficult life. And that prime minister who shares her surname was, of course, her great grandfather. What happens after December 1990 is that liberal capitalism turns out to be as awful as communism. There are Ponzi schemes, there is drug dealing and sex trafficking. Everybody’s telling them that they’re free, but it’s a very strange, horrible kind of freedom. Her father is put in charge of an Adriatic port and is tasked with sacking lots of Roma workers. Whereas before, under communism, they did have a job. Then there’s a period of civil war. When they go to their high school dance, their graduation ceremony, they have to have a military presence, men with machine guns, because the possibility of being shot up, for some reason that you don’t even understand, is so high. What makes it so good is that not only is it a fantastic subject, but she tells it beautifully. It’s very funny. There are these wonderful stories. Her parents fall out with the neighbours over an empty Coke can. An empty Coke can is so sophisticated, they put it in pride of place on the mantelpiece. Then the neighbours accuse her parents of having stolen it. The children also trade bubble gum wrappers. They’ve never seen bubble gum, but somehow wrappers have been left behind. They smell them and trade them. She’s very funny about how after 1990, you start to get left-wing people coming to Albania—Scandinavians in particular—and lecturing the Albanians. ‘You had the wrong sort of socialism. You should do it our way’. It’s the absolute colonizing arrogance of the European hard left coming in and telling Albanians that they’d been doing communism all wrong. Yes. The point she makes is that something was hugely lost when they switched to a market economy and liberal democracy. Before, there was enormous solidarity. There were informal financial dealings between neighbours: you lent your neighbour half a pound of sugar or all your life savings because you knew you would get it back. There was absolute trust. Things were bad, but you were all in it together. There was a sense of comradeship, a touching belief that it really mattered that everybody should have a chance to flourish, that this is what they were doing, and a real belief that that was possible, no matter how naive that seems. Once liberal democracy comes in, something is lost. There are Ponzi schemes, there’s aggressive individualism. She’s very, very critical of capitalism, she really is. She ends by saying that she thinks that socialism is still a vibrant possibility. Part of our best books of 2021 series."

"This is a book which I’ve only just finished reading. It’s written by an LSE professor of political theory, Lea Ypi, who is also an expert on Immanuel Kant. It’s mostly a memoir about growing up in Albania. But that doesn’t adequately describe the book, because, as its title suggests, it’s really about different conceptions of freedom, told through experience and reflection on that experience. It’s very different from my other choices here. It’s a really fascinating and wonderful book, and beautifully written too. You won’t regret buying this one, for sure. It’s not straightforwardly philosophical throughout, but the underlying political questions emerge through a child’s experience of growing up in Tirana as Albania’s form of socialism is collapsing, as it finally did in 1990. Ypi describes her childhood in a communist state, where she is so much in thrall to what she is taught about freedom under communism that she even goes to hug a statue of Stalin. Her curiosity about the world reveals that her world of certainties, particularly in relation to her family, is not quite what she thought it was. It’s a book about freedom both under Stalinist communism and in a liberal capitalist system, written from experience, and told through her and her family’s encounters with different ways in which their freedom has been curbed. Ypi thinks that if you believe you are free is a living in London, that is just as much a delusion as it was for her growing up in Tirana believing that she was free. It’s a book about a family and the degree to which historical circumstances shaped freedom for its members. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s a passage near the end of Free where Ypi describes how this book was originally going to be an overtly philosophical one about overlapping ideas of freedom in liberal and socialist traditions, but that as soon as she started writing it, the abstract ideas turned into people she knew, people who were the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. The result is unexpected and far more than just a collection of memories. We are very fortunate that she went in this direction. Not many writers could have pulled this off with such grace and elegance. Leaving Albania for Italy and ultimately for London was not a journey for her to a place of freedom. That would be the Hollywood version of her life. In a way this is a spoiler, but liberalism for her carries with it associations of the destruction of solidarity, and of turning a blind eye to injustice, with victims of the system whose lives are very far from free. There is a kind of ideological delusion that we suffer from in liberal societies, she argues. There are two books which caught my eye, both of which could have made the list, for different reasons. Both address contemporary issues using philosophical tools. Both are provocative, though in different ways. They force the reader to think. Amia Srinivassan’s The Right to Sex , a collection of essays on themes as varied as whether or not students should sleep with their professors (her answer is no, largely for psychological reasons about the relationship), whether we should think of people who sell sex as sex workers and decriminalise prostitution (yes), whether we should abolish prisons (ultimately, in an ideal world, yes), and much more. And, more controversially perhaps, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls , which is a clearly-written argument about gender and the implications of allowing self-declaration to be a sufficient criterion for gender change. This is a book that has been much maligned, often by people who haven’t taken the trouble to read it. There are points I disagree with in both books, but I am grateful for both writers for helping me think more clearly about the issues they address. That, I think, is the role of good public philosophy. Part of our best books of 2021 series."