An interesting memoir, one I didn’t entirely connect with but still found to be a worthwhile read. Lea Ypi grew up in Albania, which until sh3.5 stars
An interesting memoir, one I didn’t entirely connect with but still found to be a worthwhile read. Lea Ypi grew up in Albania, which until she was 11 was an isolated nation under one-party Stalinist rule. Not knowing anything else, she was a happily indoctrinated kid, and in for a shock when the regime fell and she learned about her family’s secrets and her country’s dark side. The memoir is about her childhood and teenage years, and largely told from a child’s perspective, which allows the reader to enter into her worldview and make discoveries alongside her (I admit, I hadn’t figured out her family’s code either before she explained it). And it is well-written and insightful about the key people in her life, namely her mother, father and grandmother. The author relates many episodes from her life quite vividly, and I learned a fair bit about Albania both during and after one-party rule.
That said, the author is now a philosophy professor and it shows, as she spends a lot of time analyzing the worldviews of her adult relatives, while increasingly coming across as a passive observer in her own memoir. I was startled at the end to discover that this book began as a project to explain to her politically conservative mother how she became a professor of Marxist theory after all the family had been through. Hopefully her mother now gets it, but I’m afraid I didn’t quite follow: her childhood indoctrination and disillusionment is there, and we see some insightful critiques of western society’s inequalities and hypocrisies from the Albanians, as well as the very mixed blessing of “freedom.” (After the end of Stalinist rule, Albanians can freely leave the country—only to promptly be refused entry by everyone else as unwanted migrants, unless they happen to be rich. They can vote, but many lose their jobs, lose their savings to pyramid schemes, and see neighborhood solidarity and mutual assistance break down as violence and trafficking flourish.) In the epilogue, Ypi goes to college in Italy and is unsettled to see classmates romanticizing socialism without taking into account the experiences of countries like Albania. Then the book ends, without ever showing how she came back around to Marxism—we can make some educated guesses based on her prior observations, but no more than that.
So as a tale of a woman’s intellectual journey, this book feels rather incomplete. But as a collection of stories illuminating a childhood in a country most people know little about, I found it engaging, thoughtful and well-written, a window onto a world with which I was not familiar. Certainly worth a read for the interested....more
If you happen to be writing a dissertation called “Artistic Representations of Life Under Communism,” you definitely want to read this book. If you arIf you happen to be writing a dissertation called “Artistic Representations of Life Under Communism,” you definitely want to read this book. If you are just looking for entertainment, you probably don’t.
Thesar Lumi, our narrator, is indeed a loser. At age 40, he’s an alcoholic, still living with his parents, and working dead-end jobs when he works at all. The initial setting is Albania in 1991, but most of the book relates Thesar’s life story: essentially, the story of how growing up under a totalitarian regime turned him into the loser he is.
The story is not an uninteresting one, but it’s told in such a way that guarantees it will be found primarily in university libraries. Mostly it’s narration, including paragraphs that go on for more than a page; characters speak occasionally but there’s not the back-and-forth dialogue common to English-language literature. Consequently, the characters are reasonably distinct, but mostly because Thesar just tells us what they’re like; it would be a difficult for a reader to become emotionally attached to anyone in the story, including Thesar himself. There are some decent visuals and symbolism, although the historical background itself is not explained. Sensible enough, since the book was originally written in Albanian for readers who hardly needed a primer, but for the translation, an introduction would have been appropriate.
As for the translation itself, it is quite readable. There are lots of short sentences and the prose flows well enough. It could have used another read-through by an editor though, as there are a few glaring mistakes (“she consumed me literally body and soul”.... so she’s a cannibal and a Dementor?).
At any rate, this book will be of limited interest: not be a bad choice if you’re looking for a political novel about the psychological effects of living under a repressive regime, particularly if you are already familiar with Albanian history, but not something that is likely to have broad appeal. I don’t regret reading it, particularly since it's quite short, but wouldn’t seek out more of Kongoli’s work....more
Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship
>
Books:
albania
(2)
Loading...
