I really enjoyed Ypi's first book and was very pleased to read this book too, although I am not sure how to categorise it. While Ypi did a lot of research in various archives and discovered many fascinating things so much of the book was filled in/imagined that I started to wonder if it was more of a novel than biography. The final archive discovery however put a lot of the narrative choices into perspective. In that way that sometimes happens the novel I read just after this was also set in the same location/time frame and the things I'd learned from Ypi's book made the novel even more fascinating. Sometimes the truth is like fiction...

’ve read Lea Ypi’s previous book Free and considered it both interesting and thought provoking. Indignity, whilst a very different story, was equally engaging. Following the publication of a photograph of her grandfather (Asllan) and grandmother (Leman) and some resultant online trolling, Ypi delves into the Albanian state archives and secret service files in an attempt to find the truth of her grandmother’s life to compare with the provable facts she knows and the stories Leman told her. The book is a mixture of Ypi’s real life research experience and her imagined fictionalisation of her grandmother’s life. Like Free, it provides a lot of historical context but in an interesting and easily absorbable way. Prior to these two books, I knew nothing about Albania’s history. During her three years of research, what she finds surprises her and, ultimately, the reader. Along the way, she makes many interesting observations on what history is and why it matters. There are many thought provoking comments, as relevant now as they were then, such as ‘Labels are crucial. Without labels you have no definitions, without definitions you have no categories, without categories you can't organize anything - it's chaos. Lord Curzon, a rather wise Englishman, put It rather well. He called the problem to be solved "the unmixing of peoples". But how can you unmix something if you don't know what was mixed in the first place?' and ‘ Everyone knew that patriotism was the fatal bite of an innocent-looking insect’. Free is a book I’ve recommended to many people, especially those I think may be open minded enough to consider different ways of living. It’s a straightforward representation of Ypi’s lived experience. Indignity is slightly different, slightly less accessible and I felt a definite frustration when the fictionalisation abruptly stopped shortly after the war with the rest of Leman’s life summed up in a few short sentences (though I understand why, and equally recognise that much of her later experience was covered tangentially in Free). Ypi’s point is very much that Leman is not here to tell her own story so we must construct what we can from where we can, but ultimately this is not Lemans’s story, it’s an exploration of what is truth, facts, history. As Ypi says, ‘Truth matters … because there are lessons to learn’ but ‘Facts can only be reliable if one trusts the mechanisms through which they are transmitted, if error is no longer possible. … If interpretation is always the result of ideology, manipulation, propaganda, how do I know I'm even thinking my own thoughts?’ Thank you Penguin Press UK for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own