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Indignity by Lea Ypi

There might be a reason to compare Lea Ypi’s Indignity to her previous book Free, but I can’t get myself to think of one. It is again a sort of an investigation into her family history, connected to a broader situation in the 20th century Albania. This time, she’s writing about a life of her grandmother, and spends a lot of time in archives. Is she academic researcher, or looking into a family history? She keeps being asked and is not sure at first.

They stayed at the luxurious Hotel Vittoria, a resort nestled high in the Dolomites, seemingly suspended in that time-outside-time unique to mountain retreats, where one’s proximity to the sky makes everything unfolding below retreat into the misty distance. They tried to avoid reading the newspapers or listening to the radio, and almost forgot the world was at war. Asllan’s nightmares stopped. (p. 203)

Well, I wasn’t sure too about half way through, because it was going on in very slow pace, but the information value was still high and it kept me interested. It contains many intimate, tragicomic moments. Moreover, story of this part of the world at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is a wonderfully complex situation that I didn’t know much about and which is described here on a human scale. This is not the History of Albania, it’s a personal book and I found a lot of moments there that were kind of familiar. And, on the contrary, some parts of it described things new to me in relation to my own family history.

‘I was never unfree,’ she protested. ‘What most people take for freedom is in fact a sort of slavery to passion: fear, greed, envy. I think we’re only free when we try to do the right thing.’ (p. 315)

I learned a lot here, some of the passages are incredibly beautifully written. Especially the last few chapters are just next level.

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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is one of those books where half of the beauty is having zero spoliers. So how to talk about it without breaking the spell? Piranesi si living alone inside infinite maze. He’s fishing and cooking seaweed, his own existence is tied to surrounding environment and being in service of Great and Secret Knowledge. Many things are unknown. He is exploring and studying in detail what he sees and what is happening to him. And while not much happens at first, the story soon starts to pull you into some kind of magical golden sequences:

Many things are unknown. Once – it was about six or seven months ago – I saw a bright yellow speck floating on a gentle Tide beneath the Fourth Western Hall. Not understanding what it could be, I waded out into the Waters and caught it. It was a leaf, very beautiful, with two sides curving to a point at each end. Of course it is possible that it was part of a type of sea vegetation that I have never seen, but I am doubtful. The texture seemed wrong. Its surface repelled Water, like something meant to live in Air. (p17)

It is really good. Would love to read this in my older teens and I’m not surprised that animated film adaptation is in the works.