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21 October 2024 - Hombrechtikon
Lea Ypi was born a couple weeks after me in 1979. At a bookshop in Prishtina a couple weeks ago the clerk recommended her memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Of course the reference to Francis Fukuyama in the title caught my attention and I decided to pick it up. It's excellently written, deeply personal, and very insightful for the experience of Albanians in the 80's and 90's. My 1997 was tough, but Ypi's coming of age was much more difficult. And when the communists fell years earlier she had the scales fall from her eyes to everything the elders in her life, parents, grandparents, teachers, and others had been insinuating but left unsaid. When they talked about people going to "university", that was actually prison. She learned that her grandfather had not abandoned the family to study, but was incarcerated because her great-grandfather had collaborated with the Italian Fascists. Familial guilt. For most of her teen years, Albania seemed to be progessing although drug smuggling, human trafficking, and ponzi schemes stealing entire families' saving were things she all personally experienced. Her father was even in the national parliament. Then in 1997 the country collapsed into civil war and it seemed to Ypi that world of her socialist childhood was better. She says she left and never returned. So at the end the book takes a strange turn as we learn that she is a professor in Britain arguing for true Marxism, which has apparently never been implemented correctly anywhere. And so, at the end, I realized that her reference to Fukuyama's phrase "the end of history" was intended ironically.
