Books in brief
Free
by Lea Ypi (Penguin, £20)
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, pro-democracy protests flooded the streets of communist-run Albania. Lea Ypi, now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, was among them. She begins her memoir by recalling how, at the age of 11, she was hugging a decapitated statue of Stalin.
Part social and political history and part family drama, Free is a child’s story told through an adult’s eyes. During her early years, Ypi went through a period of rebellion and started to question the way her communist society worked: “I wanted to know why everyone demanded freedom if we were already one of the freest countries on Earth.”
In communist Albania, a can of Coca-Cola was a marker of social status
Having been led to believe that “my family shared my enthusiasm for the Party, the desire to serve the country,” it becomes clear to her that her parents’ loyalty to Enver Hoxha, the communist leader who died in 1985, is not as cast-iron as she once thought: the adults, she notices, often speak in “hushed voices.” Living a divided life, she thinks of herself as someone “born into the wrong family.”
This book provides a fascinating insight into what is an underreported time, and it is related with a fine sense of detail. Ypi writes that the asthma pump belonging to her father is “like a miniature Molotov cocktail,” while a rare can of Coca-Cola becomes a “marker of social status.” She spends a fortnight at a Pioneers of Enver camp; but within six months the red scarf she had proudly won there would “turn into a rag with which we wiped the dust off our bookshelves.”