Interweaving two narrative strands that move between the present and the past, between fact and fiction, between what we know and what we can imagine about Lea Ypi's grandmother, who was suspected by the state of being a spy in communist Albania, Indignity is a radical philosophical exploration of dignity and its relationship to truth, ideology, identity, and historical memory.
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.
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.
