With limited records, Ypi writes her historical chapters as fiction ... [Ypi] wants to defend her beloved grandmother from the internet trolls, but she is also committed to investigating the elisions and blockages, both actual and psychological, that mark her grandmother’s life and legacy ... If the dialogue in the novelistic chapters of Indignity occasionally feels wooden, with characters turned into mouthpieces for ideas, the narrative overall is gripping ... Notable for its efforts to shine a light on the humanity of all its characters, and for its refusal to totalize. There are no grand revelations or judgments; by the final page, we both know and do not know Leman. Yet she will stay with me — fragmented, buffeted by history, eroded by time, but indelible all the same.
Leman led a life so rich in incident that only a novel could do justice to its complexities, and a novel, of sorts, is exactly what Ypi has written ... An inward-looking rumination but a desperate attempt to conjure a bygone milieu — and a fitting rejoinder to the tendencies it wishes to contradict ... Ypi displays a certain audacity as she sets about reconstructing a world she never witnessed, but she is no more presumptuous than the files she is working from ... Remarkable and ambitious.
The book is a labor of love and obsession, a search for answers by a philosopher who can, at times, overthink things. But it’s a tribute to Ms. Ypi that we, too, come to care about the questions that drive her to distraction.
Political philosopher Lea Ypi, while visiting Greece, mentioned to a young intellectual that she was there to research her late grandmother’s life in the government archives. 'Women and archives,' he replied. 'Good luck with that. You’re better off writing a novel.' In a way, Ypi has. Indignity: A Life Reimagined charts her attempts to locate information about her grandmother, Leman Ypi, in the declassified records of communist Albania’s secret police ... To compensate for the many gaps in the archives, Ypi, a professor at the London School of Economics, has created an arresting hybrid work. Indignity features nonfiction chapters detailing her investigation into Leman’s life, reproductions of historical documents pertaining to her family, and fictionalized sections in which she imagines her grandmother’s experiences as she navigated a tumultuous historical era ... In addition to penetrating some of the mysteries of her grandmother’s life, Ypi writes of Leman’s most painful experiences with compassion and empathy. Above all, she is interested in defending her grandmother’s dignity, and in that she has succeeded.
Part memoir and part historical novel – or, if you will, part imaginative reconstruction of a secret family history, navigating from point to point according to blurred archival traces ... The real action, in such a book, lies not in the scenes of a life reconstructed (however beautifully this has been done) but in what the reconstructor makes of them. Interpretation is all ... A rich account of lives lived inside the gates of history.
Remarkable ... The book emerges as a clever hybrid, happily exploiting all the many possibilities of telling a life story. In the process, not only is the life of an individual described and plotted with great success, but also, at the same time, a form of oblique history of 20th-century Albania is offered, illuminating all its perversities, absurdities and ruthlessness.
An experiment with speculative history ... Confront[s] problems of human agency and historical contingency in deceptively simple, accessible prose ... Ypi is admirably, if at times excessively, self-conscious of her own project ... The author harnesses her own convictions to retell Leman’s story and to overcome the silences and mistakes of the historical files.
The core of Indignity is a richly reimagined retelling of Ypi’s grandmother’s life ... History brought to life through Ypi’s novelistic style ... [Ypi's] conclusion – about the limited nature of the historical record itself – is thought-provoking. But it is narratively unsatisfying, too.
To the philosopher’s preoccupation with weighty existential themes Ypi adds the insights of a novelist: the narrative of Leman’s life is textured, emotionally intimate, and, especially in the first half, related with a dry wit ... For a professional philosopher, Ypi is remarkably well suited for the novelistic craft.
Heartfelt ... The narrative can, at times, devolve into a dizzying array of governments, military takeovers, and insurgent political movements. However, the profound descriptions of Leman’s struggles are poignant ... A moving meditation.
