Each one suspects his apocalypse or his final judgment. The most pretentious, like Malthus, predicted some near end from the sociological point of view. The end of history, in this Albanian writer named Lea Ypi, is more of a much more personal perspective. Because the end will come when it comes. The thing is, individually it never stops coming for one or the other.
Historical circumstances make up intra-stories here, there and everywhere. And it's always good to discover that kind of parallel universes from the deepest interiors. Because living in the most inopportune place at the worst moment gives rise to feelings of relief for those who tell it and of estrangement for those who listen or read it. In the synthesis is the grace of all that of the end that some consider closer than the rest...
When she was a girl, barely eleven years old, Lea Ypi witnessed the end of the world. At least from the end of a world. In 1990 the communist regime in Albania, the last bastion of Stalinism in Europe, collapsed.
She, indoctrinated at school, did not understand why the statues of Stalin and Hoxha were being torn down, but with the monuments, secrets and silences also fell: the population control mechanisms were revealed, the murders of the secret police...
The change in the political system gave way to democracy, but not everything was rosy. The transition towards liberalism meant the restructuring of the economy, the massive loss of jobs, the wave of migration to Italy, corruption and the bankruptcy of the country.
In the family environment, that period brought unprecedented surprises for Lea: she discovered what were the "universities" in which her parents had supposedly "studied" and why they spoke in code or in whispers; she learned that an ancestor had been part of a pre-communist government and that his family's assets had been expropriated.
Mixture of memoirs, historical essay and sociopolitical reflection, with the addition of a prose of superb literary invoice and brushstrokes of a humor tending to the absurd -as it could not be otherwise, given the place and time that is portrayed-, Libre es de a dazzling lucidity: it reflects, from personal experience, a convulsive moment of political transformation that did not necessarily lead to justice and freedom.
You can now buy the book “Libre: The challenge of growing up at the end of history”, by Lea Ypi, here:
