It starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.
The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi’s grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. “Morally degenerate” was one comment. “Fascist collaborator” another.
And so, in Indignity, Ypi sets off to find out exactly who her grandmother was. It is, she writes, partly out of a sense of duty, to defend her family member from the trolls – a kind of 21st-century version of EP Thompson’s famous call for history to rescue the dead from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. But partly, Ypi admits, it is because she finds the photo unsettling. How to reconcile her beloved, compassionate grandmother with this glamorous young woman living it up in Mussolini’s Italy?
From here, two parallel stories unfold. The core of Indignity is a richly reimagined retelling of Ypi’s grandmother’s life. Born in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in 1918, Leman Leskoviku came into a world that was already falling apart. Cosmopolitan empires were collapsing into nation states, unsure how to treat families like hers: Albanian-speaking, living in Greece, with a proud record of service to the Ottoman state.Leman’s childhood is shaped by the uncertainty of those years: the trauma of wars just ended, economic decline, and blunt, brutal social engineering. As Ypi describes, millions were forcibly moved across newly drawn borders. Leman’s nanny, one of Salonica’s many Muslim Turks, is barely able to hold back tears as she is packed off to central Anatolia.
Amid the ambiguity, and to escape an unwanted suitor, Leman sets her own life on a different path. At just 18, she decides to move to Albania alone. Ypi’s Ondaatje prize-winning memoir, Free, was haunted by stories of Albanians fleeing to neighbouring countries to escape the violence of the 1990s. This story hinges on a young woman’s extraordinary choice to move the other way.
In 1936 Leman finds herself in Tirana for the first time, a city of contrasts, of “Chanel perfume and sheep manure”. She lands not only her own job as a civil servant, but a husband of her own choosing, too. He is the son of an Albanian statesman, at a time when all of politics is in flux. And so the book moves through the next two decades, formative years both for Leman and for the young country she now calls home. It is led in turn by a self-crowned politician-king, then by a civilian government – guided partly by Leman’s father-in-law, and drawn into the orbit of Mussolini’s Italy. Finally, as Europe descends into war again, it is overrun by fascist, Nazi and communist troops.
It is a history brought to life through Ypi’s novelistic style. Deaths in the family – whether on a tragic wedding day or out on the front line – are more poignant seen through Leman’s eyes. The narrative is suspenseful, not least because Leman’s adopted family is so close to power – close enough, for example, that she can smell “lavender and onions” on the breath of a young Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who would go on to rule Albania for 40 years. Eventually Leman’s husband – Ypi’s grandfather – is accused, in Hoxha’s new Albania, of being an enemy of the state, with devastating consequences for her and her young son.
Alongside that story, the book also traces Ypi’s own search among the archives to see what she can find out about Leman. Sometimes, the documents she uncovers – informants’ reports, prison confessions, transcripts from the Albanian constituent assembly – are used to brilliant effect, complementing the broader historical story. But it is much less clear whether this quest lives up to the initial sense of intrigue – the hints of spying, fascist collaboration, and the photo of a young couple enjoying their honeymoon in the Alps. Her conclusion – about the limited nature of the historical record itself – is thought-provoking. But it is narratively unsatisfying, too.
Ypi may have known all along that some secrets are for history to keep. “Women and archives,” one student tells her, reflecting on how little has been preserved about so many, “you’re better off writing a novel!” But if the paper trail peters out, a different goal may still have been met. When Ypi’s grandmother died in 2006, she explains, she spoke at her funeral, but couldn’t find the words to do justice to the woman Leman had been. With Indignity, she may have done so at last.
• Indignity by Lea Ypi is published by Penguin (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
