Bluesky

The narrator of Lea Ypi’s Indignity is a woman on a mission. When the book begins, she’s lost in Tirana, the capital of Albania, on a busy street called Paris Commune, trying to find the archive of the Sigurimi, the former Albanian secret police. People keep asking, “You’re not from here, are you?” It’s complicated. The narrator has the same name as the author of this book, who is described in her bio as a “native of Albania,” and she says that she’s had an address on the street for years. But she hasn’t spent much time in the city since the death of her dear paternal grandmother, Leman, in 2006. Almost everyone the narrator meets keeps asking her to explain why she’s come back.

The best version of this question comes from a taxi driver in a MAGA hat who takes the narrator to the archive: “Are you going there for work or fun?” “For fun,” she guesses. For work, Lea Ypi the author is a political theorist at the London School of Economics, best known for Free, her great memoir, sometimes also called a novel, based on her childhood as a follower of “Uncle Enver” (Hoxha) in the last years of the dictatorship. The bio in that book mentioned her “expertise in Marxism and critical theory.” (After the success of Free, that phrase was cut to make room for “prizewinning,” “international bestseller,” and even “one of the most important thinkers in the world,” but going mainstream has only made Ypi more ruthlessly self-critical.)

The soldier outside the archive asks, “What is the purpose of your visit today?” He doesn’t really care, but the narrator’s elevator pitch involves a lost photograph of Leman and her husband, Asllan, on their honeymoon in the Italian Alps in 1941, which showed up on Facebook and “went viral in Albania.” The archivist Vera D. asks, “Did you apply to see the files as a researcher or a family member?” (Copying fees are waived for people investigating relatives.) “I applied as a researcher,” the narrator says. But she feels like an “archaeologist in the temple of mutilated knowledge, a shaman leaning over a rotting corpse.” An archaeologist might intrude into a house of worship to look for the fragments of some mysterious old faith. But what is a shaman supposed to do with archival remains, or with the restless spirits of her own ancestors?

Indignity shares some characters and philosophical concerns with Free, but it’s a very different kind of book—more passionate, more intellectual, messier in a way that’s more engaging and provocative. Its basic design is simple: A frame story about doing research leads into historical fiction based on the first 30 years of Leman’s unfortunate life. Born in 1918 in the cosmopolitan city formerly known as Salonika—Thessaloniki since its annexation by Greece in 1912—Leman decided to migrate to Albania when she was 18. In the late 1940s, after the arrest of her husband, she was sent with her infant son (the author’s father) to dig ditches on a collective farm.

Leman played a central role in Free as well, but as a sheltering presence rather than a painful absence. She was a moral anchor in a world of illusions and dark ironies, a wise and enigmatic steward of simple truths. The conceit of Indignity is that, even if you break through the lies that you’ve grown up with, there’s not necessarily a truth behind them waiting patiently for you to arrive. Ypi is no longer protected from the past by her parents and by Leman, as the child was in Free, but her knowledge is still limited for specific reasons as well as universal ones, just by the nature of imperfect memories and time. Some of her sources are informants with incredible code names like The Tribune, White Chewing-Gum, and March Wind, whose testimony can hardly be trusted. But all dead grandparents are mysterious in their own ways, even when the sources are abundant and reliable. They’re history incarnate.

Each of Indignity’s three parts begins with a chapter called “Prologue.” The first one centers on that lost photograph of Leman and Asllan on Facebook and the nasty comments posted underneath, a MacGuffin that perfectly represents the author’s loss and current predicament. The first comment on the picture is the most benign: “She carried herself with such dignity, and those communist monsters robbed her of it.” Ypi wants to fight this characterization, in terms that might risk recalling Whitney Houston (“No matter what they take from me / They can’t take away my dignity”), but she stops herself and the subsequent comments distract her, including one that hits closer to home: “Ypi lectures around the world about how capitalism is wrong…. Meanwhile, she conveniently forgets her own grandfather,” Asllan, “who rotted for decades in a communist prison.”

The viral photograph is more than just a device to set the plot in motion. It also essentially takes the cliché of the snapshot that inspires memories and smashes it to pieces. Ypi’s impulse to defend her grandmother’s dignity quickly runs into an impasse: Her memories are no longer just her own; maybe the trolls even know something that she doesn’t. One claims that Leman was some kind of fascist spy or communist informant—and, for the sake of suspense, it’s possible. But the more substantive issue is conceptual: What is this “something” that her grandmother called dignity? Is it inherent to all humans, as Leman believed, or does it exist only in relation to others? And how much do we need to know about a person to understand what it means to them?

The first part of Indignity, about Leman’s life in Salonika up to her seemingly hasty choice to move to Albania, sometimes reads like a fairy tale. It begins with the rewriting of a family legend about Leman’s own grandfather Ibrahim Pasha, who supposedly died in Constantinople from eating too much baklava while celebrating the birth of a grandson in Salonika—a miscommunication, since the baby was Leman. In Ypi’s reimagining, the pasha’s wife pleads with the Jewish doctor, Elias Levy, to ascribe to her husband a more dignified cause of death; she settles for a heart attack. This ridiculous story provides the occasion for some serious historical background on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as well as more reflections on the meaning of dignity that are really the dilemmas of the writer herself, who is also struggling with what to say and what to leave unsaid.

A scene of young Leman witnessing the “unmixing of peoples” after the First World War, and her later decision to migrate to Albania, frame her whole life in terms of self-creation rather than contingency or determination by others. Her choice to migrate is artfully juxtaposed with the suicide of her stoic, intellectual Aunt Selma on the day of her wedding to Gustav Heym, a German businessman who negotiated the marriage through Selma’s brother, Leman’s father. Such stories, while presumably true, can only be narrated in a mode that combines rapid chunks of historical context with devices from popular melodrama. They can be hard to follow without consulting the timeline and list of characters at the front of the book. As in any good soap opera like Capital, however, the various parts are mostly intelligible in themselves, even if the details have a deeper meaning for those more dedicated to reading like a researcher and making connections.

The prologue to Part Two is subtitled “The Greek,” because Leman’s origins in Greece ultimately define her identity as a suspected foreign agent in the Sigurimi archive. The historical fiction in this part begins in 1936, with the 18-year-old Leman having just arrived in Tirana and getting something called a “registration certificate.” Surprisingly, this bureaucratic task becomes one of the most bizarre and powerful scenes in the book, in a chapter called “The Dogs,” in which a bad smell with a mysterious cause is used to represent the banal evil of state-sanctioned violence. (The device is too good to spoil by revealing the source of the smell here.) Asllan also shows up, having recently returned from a stint as a young socialist in Paris campaigning for the Popular Front. Asllan’s backstory is told partly through his later “Investigative Judicial File,” in the first of a series of “Intermezzos” that appear to excerpt historical documents. Another intermezzo excerpts one of Asllan’s articles from the time, about the French heroes of the Enlightenment, with the ominous title “Lessons From History.” Right on cue, Enver Hoxha himself shows up, a little drunk, smelling like “onion and lavender,” to criticize the article and Asllan’s ambivalent relationship to revolution. Things go south pretty quickly for the Ypis from that point on.