Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and The Sunday Times

A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans.

For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests.

Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking.

With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393867749
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	909 KB

About the Author

Lea Ypi is professor in political theory at London School of Economics, and adjunct associate professor in philosophy at the Australian National University, with expertise in Marxism and critical theory. She lives and works in London.

Table of Contents

1 Stalin 1

2 The Other Ypi 13

3 471: A Brief Biography 26

4 Uncle Enver Is Dead 35

5 Coca-Cola Cans 46

6 Comrade Mamuazel 58

7 They Smell of Sun Cream 69

8 Brigatista 83

9 Ahmet Got His Degree 96

10 The End of History 105

11 Grey Socks 121

12 A Letter from Athens 134

13 Everyone Wants to Leave 149

14 Competitive Games 160

15 I Always Carried a Knife 170

16 It's All Part of Civil Society 181

17 The Crocodile 194

18 Structural Reforms 205

19 Don't Cry 215

20 Like the Rest of Europe 225

21 1997 234

22 Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World; the Point Is to Change It 249

Epilogue 259

Acknowledgements 265

Editorial Reviews

Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound...Free is meant to inspire.— Max Strasser - New York Times

A young life unfolding amid great historical change: ideology, war, loss, uncertainty. This is history brought memorably and powerfully to life.— Tara Westover, author of Educated

Free is astonishing. Lea Ypi has a natural gift for storytelling. It brims with life, warmth, and texture, as well as her keen intelligence. A gripping, often hilarious, poignant, psychologically acute masterpiece, and the best book I’ve read so far this year.— Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

Illuminating and subversive, Free asks us to consider what happens to our ideals when they come into contact with imperfect places and people, and what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the past.— Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Written by an intellectual with storytelling gifts, Free makes life on the ground in modern-day Albania vivid and immediate.— Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

A new classic that bursts out of the global silence of Albania to tell us human truths about the politics of the past hundred years… revelation after revelation—both familial and national—as if written by a master novelist. As if it were, say, a novella by Tolstoy. That this very serious book is so much fun to read is a compliment to its graceful, witty, honest writer. A literary triumph.— Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti

Lea Ypi is a pathbreaking philosopher who is also becoming one of the most important public thinkers of our time.… This extraordinary book is both personally moving and politically revolutionary. If we take its lessons to heart, it can help to set us free.— Martin Hägglund, author of This Life

Free is one of those very rare books that shows how history shapes people’s lives and their politics. Lea Ypi is such a brilliant, powerful writer that her story becomes your story.— Ivan Krastev, coauthor of The Light That Failed

Written by one of Europe’s foremost left-wing thinkers, this is an unmissable book for anyone engaged in the politics of resistance.— Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism

This extraordinary coming-of-age story is like an Albanian Educated, but it is so much more than that.— David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends

A lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood, and hope.— Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline

The author’s narrative voice is stunning, expertly balancing humor, pathos, and deep affection for the characters and places that defined her past. She is adept at immersing readers in her childhood experiences of unquestioned loyalty to “The Party” while also maintaining a tongue-in-cheek, critical distance from what she now recognizes as a tyrannical regime.— Kirkus

A uniquely engaging and illuminating account of a young life during a period of intense turmoil... Free offers gem after gem of the bizarre reality that Hoxhaism produced.....Detailing the absurdities of Hoxha’s regime from a child’s perspective, Ypi pulls off the remarkable feat of emphasizing their cruelty with a light and often humorous touch... Free concludes with important lessons about sustaining the ability to ‘reflect, apologize and learn,’ given that ‘people never make history under circumstances they choose.’— Misha Glenny - Times Literary Supplement

Precious little was known about life in communist Albania under Enver Hoxha. That strange world and its legacy is now stunningly brought to life in Lea Ypi’s Free. From protective doublespeak round the kitchen table to the uncertain, and unfulfilled promises of post-communism, Ypi offers a moving and compelling memoir of growing up in turbulent times, as well as a frank questioning of what it really means to be 'free.'— Frederick Studeman - Financial Times

Free is much more than a historical account of a country we know or care little about, except as a punchline for jokes about poverty and atavism. Just as Ypi and her family watched empires crumble, taking whole realities with them, we too are living in catastrophic times, with the geopolitical certainties that have sheltered us for the past century, for better or worse – the US, UK and more recently, the EU – all in various stages of collapse or decay. This, Ypi warns us, is how it will feel when the levee breaks.— Ed O'Loughlin - Irish Times

Utterly engrossing . . . Ypi's memoir is brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and - best of all - funny.— Stuart Jeffries - Guardian

Lea Ypi's Free is the first book since Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend that I have pressed on family, friends and colleagues, insisting they read it. . . a truly riveting memoir and a profound meditation on what it means to be free.— Ruth Scurr - Spectator

Ypi's deliciously smart memoir of her Albanian girlhood at the end of the Cold War is a brilliant disquisition on the meanings of freedom - its lures, false hopes, disappointments and possibilities - in our time.— Lyndsey Stonebridge - New Statesman

Essential reading. Lea Ypi's gorgeously written text - part memoir, part bildungsroman - tells a very personal story of socialism and postsocialism. Poignant and timely.— Kristen Ghodsee - Jacobin

An astonishing and deeply resonant memoir about growing up in the last days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century. . . What makes it so unforgettable is that we see this world, one about which we know so little, through the eyes of a child... It is more fundamentally about humanity, and about the confusions and wonders of childhood. Ypi weaves magic in this book: I was entranced from beginning to end.— Laura Hackett - Sunday Times

Riveting. . .A wonderfully funny and poignant portrait of a small nation in a state of collapse. . . gloriously readable. . .One of the nonfiction titles of the year, it is destined for literary accolades and popular success— Luke Harding - Observer

From the Publisher