It starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of\u00a0a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It\u00a0is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.<\/p>\n
The year is 1941, and the woman is\u00a0Lea Ypi\u2019s grandmother. Ypi saw the\u00a0picture after it had been posted online\u00a0by a stranger, gone viral across Albania<\/a>, and attracted a stream of\u00a0abuse. \u201cMorally degenerate\u201d was\u00a0one comment. \u201cFascist collaborator\u201d another.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 a kind of 21st-century version of EP Thompson\u2019s famous call for history to rescue the dead from \u201cthe enormous condescension of posterity\u201d. 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\u2019s Italy?<\/p>\n From here, two parallel stories unfold. The core of Indignity is a richly reimagined retelling of Ypi\u2019s grandmother\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s nanny, one of Salonica\u2019s many Muslim Turks, is barely able to hold back tears as she is packed off to central Anatolia.<\/p>\n It is suspenseful not least because Leman\u2019s adopted family is so close to power<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s Ondaatje prize-winning memoir, Free<\/a>, was haunted by stories of Albanians fleeing to neighbouring countries to escape the violence of the 1990s. This story hinges on a young woman\u2019s extraordinary choice to move the other way.<\/p>\n In 1936 Leman finds herself in Tirana for the first time, a city of contrasts, of \u201cChanel perfume and sheep manure\u201d. 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 \u2013 guided partly by Leman\u2019s father-in-law, and drawn into the orbit of Mussolini\u2019s Italy. Finally, as Europe descends into war again, it is overrun by fascist, Nazi and communist troops.<\/p>\n It is a history brought to life through Ypi\u2019s novelistic style. Deaths in the family \u2013 whether on a tragic wedding day or out on the front line \u2013 are more poignant seen through Leman\u2019s eyes. The narrative is suspenseful, not least because Leman\u2019s adopted family is so close to power \u2013 close enough, for example, that she can smell \u201clavender and onions\u201d on the breath of a young Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who would go on to rule Albania for 40 years. Eventually Leman\u2019s husband \u2013 Ypi\u2019s grandfather \u2013 is accused, in Hoxha\u2019s new Albania, of being an enemy of the state, with devastating consequences for her and her young son.<\/p>\n Alongside that story, the book also\u00a0traces Ypi\u2019s own search among the\u00a0archives to see what she can find out about Leman. Sometimes, the documents she uncovers \u2013 informants\u2019 reports, prison confessions, transcripts from the Albanian constituent assembly \u2013 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 \u2013 the hints of spying, fascist collaboration, and the photo of a young couple enjoying their honeymoon in the Alps. Her conclusion \u2013 about the limited nature of the historical record itself \u2013 is thought-provoking. But it is narratively unsatisfying, too.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Ypi may have known all along that\u00a0some secrets are for history to keep. \u201cWomen and archives,\u201d one student tells her, reflecting on how little has been preserved about so many, \u201cyou\u2019re better off writing a novel!\u201d But if the paper trail peters out, a different goal may still have been met. When Ypi\u2019s grandmother died in 2006, she explains, she spoke at her funeral, but couldn\u2019t find the words to do justice to the woman Leman had been. With Indignity, she may have done so at last.<\/p>\n