Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

256 pages

English language

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

ISBN:: 978-0-393-86773-2

(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 …

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.

7 editions

ralentina reviewed Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Freedom - what, where and how?

5 stars

As a child in 1980s Albania, Lea grows up feeling free. She believes in the ideals of socialism and in 'holiness' of Enver Hoxha. She doesn't miss the freedom to consume what she wants, happy to choose between toasted and non-toasted sunflower seeds. She is unaware of the system of political repression of which she is a tiny cog, and that has harmed her direct family in quite brutal ways. Then, the dictatorship falls, and capitalism comes to town. Suddenly, freedom is on everyone's mouth, but Lea starts to notice unfreedom everywhere: people lose their job and have no money for things that used to be provided for free by the state, they are forced to migrate because of unemployment, while not being allowed to migrate because of borders. Money replaces imprisonment as the main engine of coercion, until the dramatic ending when, as the country is torn apart by …

As a child in 1980s Albania, Lea grows up feeling free. She believes in the ideals of socialism and in 'holiness' of Enver Hoxha. She doesn't miss the freedom to consume what she wants, happy to choose between toasted and non-toasted sunflower seeds. She is unaware of the system of political repression of which she is a tiny cog, and that has harmed her direct family in quite brutal ways. Then, the dictatorship falls, and capitalism comes to town. Suddenly, freedom is on everyone's mouth, but Lea starts to notice unfreedom everywhere: people lose their job and have no money for things that used to be provided for free by the state, they are forced to migrate because of unemployment, while not being allowed to migrate because of borders. Money replaces imprisonment as the main engine of coercion, until the dramatic ending when, as the country is torn apart by a quasi civil-war, Lea is not even allowed to leave her house or risks being shot. Alongside Lea, we learn to know her family: first and foremost Lea's dad, Zafo, and her granny, Nini, as well as her more distant mother, and a host of more typified characters that are also braving the same transition: the dogmatic socialist teacher, the ridicolous World Bank consultant, the street bully. I really enjoyed this book!

BoMay reviewed Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Coming of age during the ‘end of history’

5 stars

The story of the author’s coming of age in Albania during the chaotic transition from the failed promises of communism to the failed promise of the ‘free market’. Engagingly written.