INDIGNITY

A noted philosopher explores her homeland and the family secrets it conceals.

Ypi, a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, opens in the archives of the former Communist secret service in her Albanian homeland, seeking documentation about her grandmother, Leman, and hoping, as she writes, to rescue her “from the trolls.” One such troll, of the social media variety, has somehow unearthed a gone-viral photo of Leman and her husband, Asllan, vacationing in the Italian Dolomites in 1941, well into World War II and the Italian occupation of Albania, leading to another troll’s accusation that Leman was a Communist spy after first having been a fascist collaborator. The assault sets Ypi on a search for the truth about her family, outsiders who, though ethnically Albanian and Muslim, had made their home in Salonica, Greece, home to a thriving Jewish community until the Nazi invasion. The family, bookish and aristocratic, enters the tobacco business in Albania with a German partner who, virulently anticommunist, is apoplectic when Leman, a convert to socialism, becomes a chain smoker, doubtless the fault of the Bolsheviks and “the way they inspire the young to disrespect their fathers and mothers.” It’s ironic, then, that Leman should have been suspected by the communist government of Enver Hoxha as a “foreign agent” and an enemy of the state who had “expressed hatred towards the People’s Republic, and the Party in Power.” Ypi’s skillfully written tale includes thoughtful meditations on the notion of dignity as a philosophical construct; in a provocative turn, Ypi compares her condition to the surveillance state of old that had Leman under constant observation: “I am a generic consumer, a cog in a corporate machine, a means to profit. She’s still recognized as human by another human…a subject whose dignity can never be fully destroyed.”

A beguiling, elegant book whose surprise ending, just one of its many real-life twists and turns, befits a mystery.