The queasy feeling comes unexpectedly.
Just when the six-year-old narrator was happy that a months-long dispute with the neighbors had been settled, the group, pregnant with raki, froze them.
She casually mentions that her parents probably don't like Uncle Enver, otherwise they would have had his photo in the living room by now.
The neighbor, a party official, saves the situation by gently admonishing the girl.
"You have to promise me," he then adds, "that you will come to me and tell me if such stupid thoughts about your family ever come to your mind again." In these moments, Lea Ypi's autobiographical story "Free" is particularly impressive: when the penetration of all areas of life through the surveillance of a dictatorship is revealed.
Ypi grew up in Albania, the special case of the Eastern bloc.
Enver Hodscha ruled there from 1946 until his death in 1985, and under him the country renounced all allies to the point of almost complete isolation.
Little Lea believes in Albania, she wishes for family members who die as martyrs in the anti-fascist struggle so that she can tell their stories in front of the class.
Because biography, she learns, is more important in socialism than one's own attitude.
She would never have been able to join “the party”, her mother later reveals to her, because her ancestors are suspect.
In all of this, the reader is always on Lea's level of knowledge.
For example, why it is a problem to associate with someone who has just graduated can only be understood once you know the code: university means prison,
This is how friendships fall apart
As devastating as the content is, the report is often ironic.
Ypi writes with that unsentimental distance that is a much-praised attitude of first-person narratives in the English-speaking world.
She often uses direct speech, which creates poignancy but sometimes resembles a play.
In the epilogue one learns that the author, now a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, originally planned a treatise on "congruent ideas of freedom" from the liberal and socialist traditions.
But then her own memories got in the way – and the realization that “behind every personification of economic categories there is a flesh-and-blood person”.
The experimental arrangement of the history of ideas has remained in its core,
She gives the answer in the second part.
It starts in 1991, the year of the first free elections.
National isolation, previously a source of sheltered pride, is turning to frustration at being a neglected Balkan province.
The father, an intellectual free spirit, sinks into discouragement because he speaks five languages but no English.
The mother, who is now a local politician, receives a delegation of French feminists in a red silk negligee, which she, misinformed by the soap advertisement, believes to be an elegant house dress.
The desired freedom is ambiguous.
On the one hand, control by the party is disappearing, but on the other hand, the same applies to the well-established rituals of maintaining relationships.
Differences in income cause friendships to fall apart.
The new talk about liberalization replaces the old slogans about democratic centralism, but the catchphrase remains.
“My family equates socialism with denial”
For the thin girl with a boy's haircut, the changing times coincide with the transformation of her own body.
Her father is elected to Parliament, but boys grimace when asked to kiss Lea while they're spinning the bottle.
Like many Albanians, Lea's family is losing their savings to the "pyramid system" that promises inflated interest rates to private investors for corporate investments.
Its collapse led to civil war in March 1997, which the author tells with the help of her old diary entries.
The constant fire of the Kalashnikov silences them at times, but at the same time life goes on: "I was thinking of killing myself," they say one day.
"Somewhere in the house there was a cuckoo hiding", on another.
Lea Ypi's book is not a classic autobiography, but a clever composition of meaningful scenes in which tragedy and absurdity, joy and cruelty lie side by side.
The fact that behind the illusion of the omniscient child one quickly recognizes the academic's serene gaze does not spoil the reading pleasure.
Whether it would have needed the epilogue is questionable.
He says a lot that was only hinted at before.
"My family equates socialism with denial," writes Ypi.
"I equate liberalism with broken promises, with the destruction of solidarity, with the claim to inherited privileges and the conscious ignoring of injustice." This can be read in view of the previous pages, in which the many contradictions of people and systems are sensitively presented became,
extremely nuanced.
And at the same time you learn what the book is really about: the experience that theory always has to struggle with the limits of practice, the theory of freedom as well as that of solidarity and community.
Lea Ypi: "Free". Growing up at the end of the story.
Translated from the English by Eva Bonné.
Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 332 p., hardcover, €28.