It’s always fascinating to read of other cultures, and Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in Albania is no exception. Albania was the last Stalinist state in Europe, and as such, very little was known about it. That all changed with the creation of independent political parties, bringing about the fall of communism, just a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However, despite my initial hesitancy, I travelled from Edinburgh to my hometown to meet Ypi, a Professor of Political Theory in LSE Department of Government, whom I have long admired for her scholarly contributions through The Meaning of Partisanship (co-authored with Jonathan White), Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency and The Architectonic of Reason. The theoretical complexity of Ypi’s work has always been riveting and enticing in academic circles. Nevertheless, it was through Free that Ypi received extensive commercial coverage and recognition for the masterful crafting of a book that exposes the paradoxes of freedom through the blissful ignorance of a child coming of age at the end of history. This is an intensely moving, beautifully written book of political philosophy, which happens to take the form of a personal memoir. 'Free' recounts the author's childhood experience of late-communism, transition, liberalism, civil war, and state failure.

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This memoir is mostly told from the perspective of a child, who absorbs the school's propaganda and her parents' and grandmother's views and opinions - which I thought was a clever way to go about telling a story that is complex and layered. Given her family's diverse biography, this provides the readers with a full-bodied, personal history that overlaps with a revolution, and a civil war, after all, when big historical events take place, people still live their small lives, sometimes, without realising they're living through important historical moments. Civil society' was the new term recently added to the political vocabulary, more or less as a substitute for 'Party'. It was known that civil society had brought the Velvet Revolution to Eastern Europe. It had accelerated the decline of socialism. In our case, the term became popular when the revolution was already complete, perhaps to give meaning to a sequence of events that at first seemed unlikely, then required a label to become meaningful. It joined the other new keywords, such as 'liberalisation', which replaced 'democratic centralism'; 'privatisation', which replaced 'collectivisation'; 'transparency', which replaced 'self-criticism'; 'transition', which stayed the same but now indicated the transition from socialism to liberalism instead of the transition from socialism to communism; and 'fighting corruption', which replaced 'anti-imperialist struggle'. Ik had geen ingang tot de juiste antwoorden omdat ik niet wist hoe ik de juiste vragen moest stellen

Umut, uğruna mücadele etmen gereken bir şeydir. Ama öyle bir an gelir ki umut yanılsamaya dönüşür, çok tehlikelidir. Mesele olguların nasıl yorumlandığıdır.” When multi-party elections were allowed in the early 1990s, Lea’s parents became leading figures in Albania’s main opposition party, committed to the idea that Albania should become just like the rest of Europe with free enterprise and freedom from corruption. But by 1997, the gap between their neoliberal dreams and kleptocratic reality widened after pyramid schemes in which the majority of its population had invested their savings collapsed and the country was plunged into civil war. Told through a child's eyes yet never "juvenile", Ypi has a group of 4 elders who shape her world: each of her parents, who share different spaces on the socialist spectrum, her French-speaking grandmother, and her true-believer Stalin-loving teacher, Ms. Nora. Like a Balkan Jojo Rabbit, Ypi was as a result in thrall to an evil dictator, and her memoir is, in part, the story of how she disabused herself, left Albania as it collapsed during the late 1990s into gangsterdom, finally becoming professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. But this is no triumphalist narrative of liberation from state oppression. Nor is this one of those eastern European memoirs dripping with ostalgie for a time before the consumer society. Ypi’s memoir is instead brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and – best of all – funny. Especially the author's mother is rendered in a complex manner, from one of the prosecuted, to a free market liberalist and a politician, who still needs to rely on the rather inert father of the family to really make it in Albanian civil society. The 1997 civil war, again an event I remember next too nothing about, triggered in part by a Ponzi scheme of shadow banks falling apart due to over exaggerated expectations of the boons of capitalism and liberalisation, is chillingly described near the end of the book.But if the first part of Ypi's book is brilliant in its narrative, the second portion - focusing on Albania in the early 90s - is an absolute tour de force. It is harrowing, poignant, and a masterful analysis of the policies that led to the 1997 civil war; it is also a brilliant takedown of the groups and ideas that were meant to make of Albania a "western" democracy, with a "market economy" and the human costs of these "structural reforms." My father assumed, like many in his generation, that freedom was lost when other people tell us how to think, what to do, where to go. He soon realised that coercion need not always take such a direct form. Socialism had denied him the possibility to be who he wanted, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to explore the world on his own terms. Capitalism was denying it to others, the people who depended on his decision, who worked in the port. Class struggle was not over. He could understand as much. He did not want the world to remain a place where solidarity is destroyed, where only the fittest survive, and where the price of achievement for some is the destruction of hope in others. From this side of history (and especially to Western readers), there are many aspects to life under Communism that may seem absurd, or improbable. And in reading about those experiences, there can be a tendency to exoticize them, or to feel pity, both on the part of the reader and the writer. It ends up feeling too expository or not genuine. But Ypi manages to sidestep this minefield by inhabiting and writing from the position of the child she used to be, a charming kid who took everything at face value. In doing so, the complex mechanisms of Communism are always present, but rarely interrogated, which allows us to live as little Lea lived: loving xhaxhi Enver and believing in Stalin, yes, but also exchanging gum wrappers for a chance at a sniff, and feeling genuine happiness at having an empty can of Coke to display on top of the TV.

An insightful and highly original memoir. A moving and witty story about growing up in Albania in the final days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century. Her father, too, had secrets. For years Lea had been brought up by her teachers to despise Xhafer Ypi, former prime minister of Albania and justice minister under the fascist Italian protectorate established after the flight of King Zog. Why, she wondered, did this disgraced figure have the same name as her dad? Later she discovered that he was her great-grandfather and his name had blighted the family, making it impossible for her parents to join the party and so further their careers. CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, DAILY MAIL, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022 Shortlist Announced". Royal Society of Literature. 2022-04-20 . Retrieved 2022-04-20.There came a turning point in December 1990, when the first free election in decades was held, but civil war was still on the way in 1997, a time Ypi records through her diary entries from the time. I enjoyed the recreation of her childhood perspective, though I might have liked at least a short retrospective section from adulthood. The book is quite funny despite the often sobering realities of life as she recounts her parents’ shifting fortunes and the fates of friends and classmates. I was surprised to learn that the family was Muslim, and that the author’s first language was French thanks to her grandmother; Albania is a real mix of cultures (I had to look on a map: it’s above Greece and just across a short stretch of water from Italy). Wonderfully funny and poignant. . . a tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime' Luke Harding, Observer