Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

Tobia introduced me to the Read Around the World challenge in which you attempt to read a book from every country in the world. This isn't a priority for me, but I have started a list and every month or two I'll try to read something off it. Free by Lea Ypi is something that wouldn't have landed on my radar had it not been for this challenge. Lea Ypi was born in Albania, so I guess I decided to start at the top. 

 

Lea is a young teen living in Albania in a Soviet-style socialist nation. She takes everything at face value, so finds discussions about politics in her family confusing since everyone is seeming to talk in code. The early 1990s brought democratic elections and Albania attempting to form closer ties to the west. What happened was a rise in pyramid schemes and by 1997 there is a civil war that required international intervention. In Lea's life, she's attempting to finish high school while the sound of Kalashnikovs echoes through the city. Her mother and brother flee to Italy, leaving her with her father. Meanwhile, Lea's just a typical teenage girl, trying to figure out who she is and what she wants her life to look like, although the future looked bleak and hard to imagine.

I think I have been utterly ruined by fiction. I generally find memoir underwhelming. And this was the case in this book. The events Ypi went through are unimaginably harsh and scary, but I was still mostly underwhelmed. This is obviously a me issue. It was neither minute enough about the domestic details (what did their meals look like? how did they do laundry) nor was her unreliable teenage narrator self detailed enough about the political environs to invest me in the outcome of national events. I mostly just read this book in a sort of trance, trying to figure out what was going on, even though I knew nothing about Albanian history and finally had resort to looking it up in Wikipedia to figure out what was going on. 

If you're into this sort of memoir, you'll like this. If not, you can probably skip it. 

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

In my family, everyone had a favourite revolution, just as everyone had a favourite summer fruit. My mother's favourite fruit was watermelon, and her favourite revolution was the English one. Mine were figs and Russian. My father emphasized that he was sympathetic to all our revolutions but his favourite was the one that had yet to take place. As to his favourite fruit, it was quince -  but it could choke you when it wasn't fully ripe, so he was often reluctant to indulge. (page 88-89)

There were a number of funny moments in this book and this whole fruit/revolution thing did make me chortle. 

Worrying was the default condition of his existence, a predicament as natural as beathing and sleeping. (page 190)

I felt personally attacked by this sentence. 

One might killed by a car, like my classmate Dritan, who was walking by the beach one evening and got run over by a young man teaching himself to drive his uncle's Audi. Or one might disappear without a trace, like Sokrat, Besa's father, who suffered from a limp and worked with a dinghy. Each night, he helped smuggle people to Italy, then returned to sleep in his bed, except for the night he didn't. And all sorts of small accidents could happen to you, like hitting a broken lamppost on a dark street while walking or falling into a manhole whose cover had just been stolen for its steel. Or one could be harassed all the way home by hungry stray dogs. Or it could be drunken men, or boys placing bets on how girls would respond to catcalling. (page 216)

I always look back fondly at the 1990s. In the US, there was no concern about war, the biggest scandal was Clarence Thomas and the Coke bottle and if Bill Clinton had indeed had sex with that woman. But reading this does make you realize that your position at birth is just an accident. 

Things I looked up:

"If" by Rudyard Kipling - Here's a link to this poem. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

fat top hat (page 76)

I liked the sun hat. (page )

cardboard hats (page 97)

bags with hats and kites (page 98)

worn a hat (page 126)

the hat was probably still hanging (page 126)

straw hat (page 201)

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Have you read a book by an Albanian author before?