Indignity
A Life Reimagined
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Indignity
Précommander pour 29,65 $
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Narrateur(s):
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Lea Ypi
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Rachel Bavidge
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Auteur(s):
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Lea Ypi
À propos de cet audio
The award-winning author of Free returns with an extraordinary investigation into historical injustice, personal and collective dignity, truth and imagination
When Lea Ypi discovers that a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941 has been posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with deeply unsettling questions. Growing up, she had been told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed “when the police came and took everything” in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II was raging in the background.
What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy in Salonica, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans, through secret police archives and muddied memories. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? If her family lived in the Ottoman Empire, why did she speak French? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941? All of these questions were also asked by the Albanian secret police.
As much a sweeping story about lost worlds as it is a philosophical inquiry, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history. Through reports of communist spies, court depositions, anecdotes and characters that live on in Ypi’s memory, we move between “now” and ”then”, fact and fiction, what we learn from archives and what we can imagine, to reckon with the injustices of the past.
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity is a meditation on the fragility of truth, both personal and political. Ultimately, Ypi asks, with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?
Ce que les critiques en disent
“Indignity is a delicate and powerful reimagining of a life which dignifies both the subject of the book, Ypi’s grandmother, and its author. It is an act of watchful, questing, loving witness, through the turmoil of the fractured Balkans in the mid 20th century. In beautifully reimagined scenes, interspersed with original State Security Service reports in their baleful, banal official-ese, Ypi brings vividly to life human beings making hard decisions and living with the consequences. And she’s able to interrogate the kinds of truths we want from archives—and from life— some of which we’re unlikely to get. Most of all it is Ypi’s own fine and compassionate moral sense of the complexities of human beings that makes this a superb read.”
--Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life
"Lea Ypi goes deep into Europe’s forgotten past to explore who owns the story of a life and who gets to tell it. A gripping tale of secret police, fractured families and undying loyalties, this is also a remarkable reflection on how history is made and what happens to the people who get left behind."
—David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends and The History of Ideas
“A captivating journey of imagination and of longing, and a gentle uncovering of a deep buried history that goes to the very heart of identity with brilliant storytelling.”
—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Ratline