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Jan-Maat's Reviews > Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
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Jan-Maat's review
bookshelves: autobiography-memoir, non-fiction, philosophy, 21st-century
Jun 16, 2023
bookshelves: autobiography-memoir, non-fiction, philosophy, 21st-century
In my opinion this book is gold. I enjoyed it so much that I read it twice, first unofficially (view spoiler)for a while sitting in a park on one of those Spring days when it is warm enough to sit outside so long as you are in the sunlight, laughing away to myself, then a second time officially on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ posting updates of parts I thought amusing and short enough.
Perhaps you have seen the episode of the Simpsons cartoon called the Crepes of Wrath which features an Albanian? In it we are told that Albania's primary export is furious political debate, this might be the book that undermines that joke.
While reading I heard of a study done on the grandchildren of people who had been killed or sent to live in the countryside during the Chinese Cultural revolution, they found that generally they were at the same or higher socio-economic level of privilege as their grandparents. I fear that is a bit of a spoiler for this book, sorry about that.
To say that I love Voltaire's Candide would be too strong, but I do think it is an amusing and clever book, but this is better in my opinion. It is a philosophical memoir written by Ypi to explain her personal Marxism to her mother despite her early childhood in the last years of Albania's peculiar (view spoiler) Communist regime.
I doubt that this is a strictly accurate or literal account - apart from criticism about factual accuracy it strikes me that the three significant adults in her life: paternal grandmother, father, and mother are a bit too Goldilocks to be true, for example when seeing a legless beggar, her father turns out his pockets to give the man all the money he has, while her mother would not give the man a penny and would explain that his poverty was is own fault, the grandmother however would give him some money but would be sure to keep enough to buy the young Ypi an ice cream - which is an important consideration to a child. The mother comes across as Margaret Thatcher's twin sister - mysteriously born years later than her twin in Communist Albania. She is too busy being fierce to listen to other people's opinions, she knows that she is correct, her favourite revolution was the English one (view spoiler), and she never bothers to look in a mirror to brush her hair. Ypi's father idolises dead revolutionaries, his favourite revolution is yet to come, actual revolutions so far have only been a disappointment, through an odd series of events in ends up in Parliament as Albania descends into civil war. The Grandmother insists on speaking French to Ypi which Lea learnt to speak before she learnt Albanian, her favourite revolution was the French revolution. Young Ypi preferred the Russian revolution her ears are open to words of her elementary school teacher; Nora. Nora's criticisms of Capitalist societies are reasonable enough, but the reader can quickly see that what she says about Albanian society is misleading. If in Albania the state supports and allows people to develop their own talents freely then how come is Ypi's mother a Maths teacher when she hates Maths while her father was forbidden to study Science and is working in Forestry? The answers lie in their mysterious biographies.
Throughout the book Ypi shows us different ideas of freedom which we can weigh up and compare as we go. As a child she has absolute freedom to decide whether to go left or right when she comes out of school, as either way will get her home. As a teenager the freedom of others to loot Government arsenals means it is not safe to leave the house for fear of gunfire. For years Albanians were not free to leave their country, but when Communism ends can they afford to travel abroad and if they can other countries have effectively closed their borders to them by imposing visa regimes.
She shows us a naive matter of factness that dominated the years around the end of communism how smuggling (drugs, women (view spoiler), guns) is perceived simply as legitimate free market activity, the country goes crazy for pyramid investment schemes - when these collapse disappointed investors seize weapons as mentioned above and take to the streets. Young Ypi has an interesting double consciousness at the time she accepts the message she hears in foreign media that the fighting is due to ethnic differences within the country even though she knows that her parents are from the two different groups and she herself doesn't know to which she might belong.
Just as if things are not going badly enough, international development agencies arrive to begin to push neo-liberal policies on to the Government.
Any way lots of things happen. And Ypi's narration is often very funny, but occasionally poignant, and perhaps overall the story is a tragedy, and if you read this book, which has been translated into a fistful of languages (many of which she speaks herself (view spoiler)), you will see why yes moves philosophically to Marxism and insists on taking the experience of Communist societies seriously to understand how a society can provide its members freedom.
Perhaps you have seen the episode of the Simpsons cartoon called the Crepes of Wrath which features an Albanian? In it we are told that Albania's primary export is furious political debate, this might be the book that undermines that joke.
While reading I heard of a study done on the grandchildren of people who had been killed or sent to live in the countryside during the Chinese Cultural revolution, they found that generally they were at the same or higher socio-economic level of privilege as their grandparents. I fear that is a bit of a spoiler for this book, sorry about that.
To say that I love Voltaire's Candide would be too strong, but I do think it is an amusing and clever book, but this is better in my opinion. It is a philosophical memoir written by Ypi to explain her personal Marxism to her mother despite her early childhood in the last years of Albania's peculiar (view spoiler) Communist regime.
I doubt that this is a strictly accurate or literal account - apart from criticism about factual accuracy it strikes me that the three significant adults in her life: paternal grandmother, father, and mother are a bit too Goldilocks to be true, for example when seeing a legless beggar, her father turns out his pockets to give the man all the money he has, while her mother would not give the man a penny and would explain that his poverty was is own fault, the grandmother however would give him some money but would be sure to keep enough to buy the young Ypi an ice cream - which is an important consideration to a child. The mother comes across as Margaret Thatcher's twin sister - mysteriously born years later than her twin in Communist Albania. She is too busy being fierce to listen to other people's opinions, she knows that she is correct, her favourite revolution was the English one (view spoiler), and she never bothers to look in a mirror to brush her hair. Ypi's father idolises dead revolutionaries, his favourite revolution is yet to come, actual revolutions so far have only been a disappointment, through an odd series of events in ends up in Parliament as Albania descends into civil war. The Grandmother insists on speaking French to Ypi which Lea learnt to speak before she learnt Albanian, her favourite revolution was the French revolution. Young Ypi preferred the Russian revolution her ears are open to words of her elementary school teacher; Nora. Nora's criticisms of Capitalist societies are reasonable enough, but the reader can quickly see that what she says about Albanian society is misleading. If in Albania the state supports and allows people to develop their own talents freely then how come is Ypi's mother a Maths teacher when she hates Maths while her father was forbidden to study Science and is working in Forestry? The answers lie in their mysterious biographies.
Throughout the book Ypi shows us different ideas of freedom which we can weigh up and compare as we go. As a child she has absolute freedom to decide whether to go left or right when she comes out of school, as either way will get her home. As a teenager the freedom of others to loot Government arsenals means it is not safe to leave the house for fear of gunfire. For years Albanians were not free to leave their country, but when Communism ends can they afford to travel abroad and if they can other countries have effectively closed their borders to them by imposing visa regimes.
She shows us a naive matter of factness that dominated the years around the end of communism how smuggling (drugs, women (view spoiler), guns) is perceived simply as legitimate free market activity, the country goes crazy for pyramid investment schemes - when these collapse disappointed investors seize weapons as mentioned above and take to the streets. Young Ypi has an interesting double consciousness at the time she accepts the message she hears in foreign media that the fighting is due to ethnic differences within the country even though she knows that her parents are from the two different groups and she herself doesn't know to which she might belong.
Just as if things are not going badly enough, international development agencies arrive to begin to push neo-liberal policies on to the Government.
Any way lots of things happen. And Ypi's narration is often very funny, but occasionally poignant, and perhaps overall the story is a tragedy, and if you read this book, which has been translated into a fistful of languages (many of which she speaks herself (view spoiler)), you will see why yes moves philosophically to Marxism and insists on taking the experience of Communist societies seriously to understand how a society can provide its members freedom.
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Reading Progress
June 4, 2023
–
Started Reading
June 4, 2023
– Shelved
June 4, 2023
–
5.43%
"I could tell my grandmother was angry. She had a bizarre way of scolding, making you feel responsible, reminding you of the consequences that your actions had for others, listing all the ways in which the pursuit of other people's goals was disrupted by the selfish prioritizing of yours."
page
17
June 4, 2023
–
5.75%
"(My mother) had a tendency to channel her frustration by finding new domestic chores: the greater the frustration, the more ambitious the scale of her projects."
page
18
June 4, 2023
–
7.67%
"Each year when he came up on textbooks, I had to explain that even though the surname was the same, we were not related. I had to explain that my father was Named after his grandfather, who simply happened to carry the same name & surname as our old prime minister (& national traitor).
- of course this is a complete coincidence 😜"
page
24
- of course this is a complete coincidence 😜"
June 4, 2023
–
9.9%
"My grandmother always said that we don't know how to think about the future; we must turn to the past."
page
31
June 5, 2023
–
11.18%
"If maths was one of my father's greatest passions, there was nothing my mother loathed more. This too was unfortunate, because not only did she have to study maths at university, she also had to teach it to secondary-school children."
page
35
June 5, 2023
–
13.1%
"As a child I was sick so rarely that I came to idolize disease, to think of convelescense as some kind of prize distributed to only a chosen few, wondering what challenges one had to overcome to become worthy of a high temperature, a chesty cough, or just a plain sore throat."
page
41
June 6, 2023
–
19.49%
"At weddings: "the guests would make their way close to the bride, waving a one-hundred lek note, which they would lick & slap on her forehead"
Does this mean that Albanian brides had to have large foreheads?"
page
61
Does this mean that Albanian brides had to have large foreheads?"
June 7, 2023
–
19.81%
"My mother would have never dreamed of accusing (the neighbours) of theft, had if not been for thecfact thatvthe stolen object was a coca cola can. At the time, these were an extremely rare sight. Even rarer was the knowledge of their function."
page
62
June 7, 2023
–
26.2%
"On the relation between my father & the antenna - the psychological dramas, the dynamic of attraction & repulsion it fostered, the subtle balance between triumph & defeat - depended every vital piece of information from abroad that my family received"
page
82
June 7, 2023
–
26.52%
"I watched all the language programmes with great enthusiasm, especially the Italian one. Imagine how much more I would enjoy the cartoons on Rai Uni, I told myself, if I could figure out what they were about."
page
83
June 8, 2023
–
27.48%
"In school we were told not to interact with people who did not look like us. We were advised to change our route if we stumbled on tourists, and to never, under any circumstances, accept anything they might offer, especially chewing gum. 'Above all, beware of the tourist carrying chewing-gum,' teacher Nora insisted."
page
86
June 8, 2023
–
28.12%
"We always knew when there were tourist children nearby because the beach smelled weird, a hybrid of flowers & butter.
I asked my grandmother what it was. She explained that they smelled of sun cream...'we don't have it," she said. 'We use olive oil. Its healthier.'"
page
88
I asked my grandmother what it was. She explained that they smelled of sun cream...'we don't have it," she said. 'We use olive oil. Its healthier.'"
June 9, 2023
–
28.75%
"we knew that we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom.
In Capitalism, people claimed to be free & equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available."
page
90
In Capitalism, people claimed to be free & equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available."
June 10, 2023
–
32.59%
"(Grandmother's ) mood brightened whenever the French revolution came up. She could talk about it tirelessly...She liked to repeat the bit of Robespierre's speech that said that the secret of freedom is in educating people, while the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant...She spoke about the characters involved...as if they were family relatives"
page
102
June 10, 2023
–
32.91%
"When my father spoke of the revolution in general, he got as excited as my grandmother did when she spoke about the French revolution...in my family everyone had a favourite revolution, just as everyone had a favourite summer fruit.
- and what is your favourite revolution?"
page
103
- and what is your favourite revolution?"
June 10, 2023
–
34.82%
"My mother & my father had radically different values & fundamentally clashing attitudes to pretty much everything...it was a great irony that they had ended up marrying because at different times & places theyight have been in conflict. History had turned them into allies."
page
109
June 11, 2023
–
38.98%
"I had no access to the right answers because I didn't know how to ask the right questions. But how could it be otherwise? I loved my family. I trusted them. I accepted everything they offered to satisfy my curiosity. In my search for certainty I relied on them to help me make sense of the world. It has never occurred to me...that my family was the sourcenot only of all certainty but also of all doubt."
page
122
June 11, 2023
–
42.49%
"My grandmother was not nostalgic for her past...she insisted that we do not inherit our political views but freely choose them, & we choose the ones that sound right, not those that are most convenient or best serve our interest.'we lost everything,' she said.' but we did not lose ourselves. We did not lose our dignity...I am the same person I always was...and I still like whisky.'"
page
133
June 11, 2023
–
42.81%
"In a society where politics & education pervaded all aspects of life, I was a product of both my family & my country. When the conflict between the two was brought to light, I was dazzled. I didn't know where to look, who to believe."
page
134
June 11, 2023
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49.52%
"Baskim asked if my father owned any grey socks he could borrow for a few months. He explained that for the election campaign the US state department had distributed brochures containing important advice on what aspiring members of parliament ought to wear. 'Apparently, only dark socks are acceptable, grey or black, but better grey,'."
page
155
June 11, 2023
–
50.48%
"Everyone agreed privacy was important.'not just important, it's your right. It's a right,' Donika explained, her voice charges with all the wisdom & authority she had accumulated during the many years spent opening envelopes."
page
158
June 11, 2023
–
52.4%
"December 1990. A letter comes from Greece from the daughter of the business partner of the author's great grandfather who had been a governor in the Ottoman empire. The letter promises to help the family recover its lost assets. Lea will go to Greece with her grandma - if they can get some money..."
page
164
June 12, 2023
–
53.35%
"In Greece they stay with a family you have fives fridges, two just for drinks.
Perhaps having money makes you crazy?"
page
167
Perhaps having money makes you crazy?"
June 15, 2023
–
59.11%
"The West...would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable (migrants ) & attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to 'protect our way of life'. And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from losing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters."
page
185
June 16, 2023
–
59.74%
"Every night more trees disappeared from the forests. One might also have called it theft, except that an individual appropriating common resources constitutes the very foundation of private property. Bottom-up privatization would be a better description."
page
187
June 17, 2023
–
61.98%
"(Buying a car is) "not good for the environment".
That topic usually led to another argument. My mother would say: "everyone is buying a car. It's a necessity. Chernobyl was much worse for the environment!" "What's Chernobyl got to do with the car?" My father would reply. My mother would continue apparently unperturbed: "the metallurgic factory the Chinese built for us, what good did that do for the environment?...""
page
194
That topic usually led to another argument. My mother would say: "everyone is buying a car. It's a necessity. Chernobyl was much worse for the environment!" "What's Chernobyl got to do with the car?" My father would reply. My mother would continue apparently unperturbed: "the metallurgic factory the Chinese built for us, what good did that do for the environment?...""
June 17, 2023
–
62.94%
"(For my mother)"the world was a place where the natural struggle for survival could be resolved only by regulating private property. Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course...unlike my father, who thought that people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good..."
page
197
June 17, 2023
–
63.9%
"The only ribbons & laces she knew we're those she & (grandma) inflicted on me as a public affirmation that 50 years of dictatorship of the proletariat were unable to crush their will to bring me up as the Balkan version of Velazquez's Infanta Margarita Theresa."
page
200
June 17, 2023
–
70.93%
""There are a lot of people who learn French still."
"Yeah, the French still learn it", my mother mocked. "They learn it twice. Once as a native language, & the second time as a foreign one.""
page
222
"Yeah, the French still learn it", my mother mocked. "They learn it twice. Once as a native language, & the second time as a foreign one.""
June 17, 2023
–
71.88%
"The author's father meets some mormons: "my father thought they only wanted to teach english; (grandma) insisted that if they only wanted to teach english, they would call themselves not missionaries but teachers."
page
225
June 18, 2023
–
72.84%
"It was Flamur who brought Van de Berg to our road
The two men met in the food market where Flamur worked as a pick pocket"
page
228
The two men met in the food market where Flamur worked as a pick pocket"
June 18, 2023
–
79.55%
"When confronted with the same decisions about structural reforms, his colleagues became cynical. 'Oh,well', they would say. 'We survived the Turks. We survived the fascists & the Nazis. We survived the Soviets & the Chinese. We'll survive the World Bank'. (My father ) was terrified of forgetting what that survival had cost."
page
249
June 19, 2023
–
93.29%
"March 1997: soon there will be foreign soldiers: Italian, Greek, Spanish, polish. International peacekeepers. I guess it's going to be good for the economy, good for prostitution."
page
292
June 20, 2023
–
94.25%
"All his life my father had admired politicians only once they were dead."
page
295
June 21, 2023
–
96.49%
"My father recited the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach as if he were reciting a verse from the Koran or the Bible. Thou shalt not cover. Thou shalt not study philosophy."
page
302
June 21, 2023
–
97.76%
"Her friends as a student: "spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this respect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.""
page
306
June 21, 2023
–
98.4%
"If there was one lesson to take away from the history of my family, & of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances that choose. It is easy to say, ' what you had was gotcha real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism...it releases us from the burden of responsibility...& we don't have to reflect, apologise & learn."
page
308
June 21, 2023
–
98.72%
"Only once did (my mother) draw attention to a cousin's remarks that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. We both laughed awkwardly, then paused & changed the topic."
page
309
June 21, 2023
–
99.04%
"In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you are a system change once, it's not that difficult to believe that it can change again. Fighting cynicism & political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me, it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past..."
page
310
June 21, 2023
–
99.36%
"This book was written mostly from a cupboard in Berlin during the Covid-19 pandemic. It turned out to be the perfect location to hide from the children I was supposed to home-school (my own) & to muse about my grandmother's words: 'when it's difficult to see clearly into the future, you have to think about what you can learn from the past'."
page
311
June 21, 2023
–
Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-16 of 16 (16 new)
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Bloodorange
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Jul 19, 2023 09:13AM
Thanks to you and your updates, I'm on a waiting list for this book in my library:-)
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Bloodorange wrote: "Thanks to you and your updates, I'm on a waiting list for this book in my library:-)"I really hope that you enjoy it!
A very interesting review Jan-Maat. I've just said in a comment on another review that I'm trying not to add to my TBR list. You might have just forced me to break that rule!I think I read about that Chinese study. The individuals involved reached the same or higher level as their grandparents, despite their family wealth being confiscated and being banned from higher education? Suggests some implications!
Ian wrote: "A very interesting review Jan-Maat. I've just said in a comment on another review that I'm trying not to add to my TBR list. You might have just forced me to break that rule!I think I read about ..."
It's quite short and in larger than average print (in the English edition anyway, yes well it is a spoiler to say that this book confirms the findings of the Chinese study - there's plainly cultural capital in that young Ypi speaks French which gets her a year early in to school, but you can also see it in her knowledge and ideas about what is normal
Sounds a fun read, (discussing one's favourite revolution :))!) glad you enjoyed it so much. Maybe because of the title, I had expected quite a different book than from your review (another larmoyant lament) so I am very intrigued to read what she philosophically draws from marxism to provide freedom.
Ilse wrote: "Sounds a fun read, (discussing one's favourite revolution :))!) glad you enjoyed it so much. Maybe because of the title, I had expected quite a different book than from your review (another larmoya..."To answer your last question you can skip most of the book and just read the last chapter :p
I wonder what you imagined, I didn't expect her philosophically to arrive at Marxism either, it's interesting how she gets there via a critique of Italian students just like her father idolising dead revoltionaries
I think Albania's changes from supporting Yugoslavia, to Russia, to China, and ultimately turning in on itself, came not so much because they were so ultra-Marxist but because 1) Enver Hoxha was increasingly paranoid about foreign attempts to overthrow him and 2) he was probably correct, and 3) Albania wanted foreign aid with absolutely no interference. It was one of the worst kinds of dicatorship around. If Ypi's grandmother did speak a lot of French, I hope she didn't keep a dictionary around because that could get you ten years in a concentration camp unless you had "permission to own a dictionary".
Bob wrote: "I think Albania's changes from supporting Yugoslavia, to Russia, to China, and ultimately turning in on itself, came not so much because they were so ultra-Marxist but because 1) Enver Hoxha was in..."Yes, I would agree on paranoia versus purity, but in the book we are seeing the issue from the perspective of how the regime presented itself to the people.
Dictionaries are never mentioned, but there is an occasion when a visiting aunt denounces a card game that they regularly played as bourgeois because she believes that a visiting cousin is a spy.
Apparently Hoxha himself taught French at one point in his life, a fact which the family deploy when trying to get the young Lea into school one year early - she's allowed to read from a translation of Hoxha's collected works into French to show that she is ready to go to school, which given what you say about owning dictionaries is a bit bizarre, but then it was a bizarre regime?
Definitely bizarre. Hoxha studied in France for a time, which must have been rare in Albania of pre-war days. I was in Albania back in 1996 and a young woman showed me her English and French dictionaries while telling me that just a few years before, they were worth a ten-year sentence. That's bizarre enough.
If you read Kadare, you can ponder a lot more of the regime's nature, often between the lines.
Bob wrote: "Definitely bizarre. Hoxha studied in France for a time, which must have been rare in Albania of pre-war days. I was in Albania back in 1996 and a young woman showed me her English and French dict..."
certainly rare, though well-placed Albanians were part of the Ottoman elite and so were cosmopolitian
Yes, true, but they mostly had to go to Istanbul to live or were sent to represent the Ottoman government in more far-flung places.
I have not seen this programme with Lea Ypi yet, you can find a document with her on Arte.tv, called Deep Thought.
@Bloodorange, sorry that I missed your comment, thank you for that too, I will look out for that!
From another review, I just went ahead and ordered it, and now I am delighted to read your take.
Kalliope wrote: "From another review, I just went ahead and ordered it, and now I am delighted to read your take."It is a book that I have been recommending strongly, there are a lot of interesting elements to it and it is funny as well. Happy reading!
