Free

A Child and a Country at the End of History

by

256 pages

English language

Published April 12, 2022 by Norton & Company Limited, W. W..

ISBN:
978-0-393-86773-2
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4 stars (2 reviews)

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 …

5 editions

Freiheit oder eine spannende Geschichte?

3 stars

Die formelle Umsetzung ist super. Die Geschichte eines Landes im Übergang/Umbruch von Sozialismus zu Kapitalismus durch die Augen eines Mädchen zu erzählen. Viel don't show, tell, viel bewusste Auslassungen, die manche Dinge noch verstärken. Allein deshalb lohnt sich das Buch. Ich weiß jedoch nicht, ob es wirklich um Freiheit geht.

An eloquent history

4 stars

I cannot truly imagine just how bewildering it must be to have been raised with one set of beliefs, ones which you wholeheartedly embraced and thought you understood, then, just as you were about to embark on your adult life, the society that underpinned those beliefs was abruptly ripped away. You discovered that your immediate family had hidden most of your history from you and your foundations weren't the solid rock you had previously relied upon. This is Lea Ypi's early life and her book, Free, does a wonderful job of allowing readers insights into the nations that were socialist Albania, transitional Albania and, sadly, civil war-ridden Albania.

I was reminded at times of Haya Leah Molnar's memoir, Under A Red Sky, by the way in which Lea Ypi's family kept the truth about themselves from their children which ultimately led to divisions with each generation having very different experiences, …