Give Them Space

Claire Foster reviews Jacqueline Feldman’s book about Paris’s artistic squat scene, “Precarious Lease.”

By Claire FosterFebruary 5, 2025

• Nonfiction

• Politics

OWING TO ITS proximity to cliché, the subject position of a white, middle-class American girl trying to write something in Paris—just look at her, holding her little pen—nothing quite beats it, in terms of humiliation. Jacqueline Feldman, clutching a tape recorder and notebook, knew this, knows this, and it is this outsider’s sense of shame that so compellingly lights up Precarious Lease (2025), her debut work of nonfiction. Precarious Lease is Feldman’s mostly journalistic but sometimes personal account of a Parisian squat known as Le Bloc, as well as various other squatting communities and countercultures. Feldman focuses on housing rights, art-making, and hospitality against the backdrop of late capitalism, the atmosphere of which affects all of us inexplicably left alive, regardless of class status or subject position (and its attendant embarrassments).

Precarious Lease found its shape over the course of about a decade, beginning in 2010. Le Bloc, a squat made up of artists, activists, and immigrants (not all of whom slept there) opened in 2012 and was emptied by police under an eviction order in December 2013. B-L-O-C is “an acronym of the squatters’ devising for bâtiment libre, ‘free building,’ occupé citoyennement, ‘occupied by citizens’ though with an adverb that is nonstandard, as ‘citizenly’ would be in English.”

This last clause is typical for Feldman, whose first book was a hybrid work called On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, published last March by artist-run experimental publisher dispersed holdings. That book contained—on top of a 30-page essay, printed in bright orange ink, that features some of the best sentences on translation and its deviant creative potential I’ve ever read—Feldman’s translation of a short story by French writer Nathalie Quintane, as well as the entirety of her master’s thesis on Quintane (written in French and un-translated in the book), which she produced for the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Bref: She cares a lot about grammar and language, and in Precarious Lease, their foregrounded character is a rigorous and delightful component of Feldman’s journalism. (A representative cluster of passages on her subjects’ syntax as well as her own: “I say he came from money, a phrasal verb without any sense of motion”; “the quotes postpone the problem of the melodrama of the verb”; “the ellipsis is the museum’s, a punctuation of survivor’s guilt.”)

The narrative that Feldman so deftly, if also desperately, weaves is characterized by this attention toward language because she will always be first and foremost a writer and—though most of the action in the book takes place before she knows this about herself—a translator. Language-learning and translation are, I think, as much a subject of this book as squat communities in Paris. After all, Precarious Lease may be understood as a work in translation, since all the interviews and conversations were originally conducted in French and have been translated by Feldman herself into English. Indeed, in a sentence near the book’s end that reads like a sigh, she writes: “I have said that this entire story fought its way to breathing life by exploiting an open door of language.”

The scope of Precarious Lease is perhaps as difficult to summarize as it was for Feldman to understand in real time. Like Le Bloc—an abandoned office building of eight floors and 8,186 square meters—the architecture of Precarious Lease is labyrinthine and features competing levels, voices, subjects, and registers. Feldman includes no introduction to her project, and thus the reader figures out the story as she tells it. And its telling is far from straightforward—one might even call it stumbling. Feldman herself calls it, during a conversation with a squatter named Anastasia, “a little bit in pieces […] but that’s the sense of the narrative, now.” Dozens of characters and complicated legislative chronologies are introduced only to disappear and then reappear, or not, in similar fashion to many of Feldman’s sources—slippery by choice, chance, or necessity. The narrative is hard-won and well worth the difficulty.

For this book, Feldman reported, interviewed, accompanied, traveled, brought food, accepted drinks offered to her, shared, squatted, corresponded, learned new vocabulary. She kept up with a cast of characters into whose orbit she fell, or designed herself to fall, sleeping at Le Bloc when not at her own apartment, the material and economic reality of which she diligently describes. (I knew to trust her once she laid bare her relationship with her family—they were nice, helping her sometimes with money, as did grants—and how much she paid for her rented room next to a bakery.) Feldman also includes, at the end, some notes on method:

Many quotes were double-checked against 6.7 days of tape I made. My reporting fills, in the end, just about forty notebooks. During the decade I worked on this book I took them with me every time I moved, either to apartments of my own or rented rooms (I count twelve moves), never losing one.

Forty notebooks, and countless doubts—of her ability to speak and understand French, of her capacity to tell this story (and why), of the legitimacy of her purview as a foreigner, of the quality of her questions, of the reasons for looking in one direction, toward one squat, as opposed to another. “Still,” she writes,

despite these hazards of identity, the occupation as a form of political action was, I came to believe, powerful, elegant precisely for its simplicities and intensities of method (I am here, with others and with our lives) and demand (I, and others here, deserve with our bodies to live). A squat was achieved by placing one’s body within it and staying, done by trading on the body, the body in its difference.

I should make it clear that Feldman does not eschew criticism of squat culture, and her reporting feels so well-rounded because of this. She notes, for example, how women were a clear minority at Le Bloc. And in terms of the art that was created there, she admired—or could at least understand—some of it, but in general,

squat art left [me] with little to love. This spurious work was slapdash, not even baptized by suffering. At the squat Le Bloc, where many artists worked, a man spray-painted fire extinguishers so they looked like rockets or, in one case, horribly, a used tampon. Why did he want to look at that? Had it been sexist, an experiment in empathy? One reeled at the waste of time only to wonder, startled, what side one was on.

In the texture of her prose, we come to understand that Feldman, in all her foreignness (and indeed because of it), is a faithful witness to how “the building itself, in its multiplicity of afterlives, appeared in a certain light as the strongest work present.”

Nothing is invented, she notes, but some names have been changed, and these changes are frequently made plain in the text, sometimes humorously, such as her inclusion of “a man I’ll call Caravaggio, a name you won’t forget is made up.” Another name we come to know is Le Général, a protagonist of sorts, who liked to say of himself, to Feldman and others, “I live inside the margin of the margin of society.” Other sources include Pascal, the former boss of a squat called Le Carrosse, Guy (or Guy Guitar, as he invited Feldman to call him, and “wrote it in my notebook for me”); Anastasia, a visual artist; Valentin, who “invent[ed] sentences”; and four women who were early or founding members of Femen, a Ukrainian feminist group, and who had been granted refugee (and, to some, celebrity) status in Paris.

As with any complex architecture, Precarious Lease is haunted by a ghost, Ludo, who died in Le Bloc. His full name, Ludovic Le Ménélec, is printed at the end of the book, one of three in a list made in memoriam. This list serves to remind the reader that these experiments in alternative living, these dreams toward an otherwise, are not without risk.

The book’s subtitle, which appears only on the inside cover, is “The Paris Document,” the definite article of which may come across as surprising to the reader who has learned to recognize the author’s definitively indefinite posture. Perhaps its intent is to counterbalance the title of the book—which, Feldman notes, is itself quite an “imprecise” term. “Precarious lease” is explained, early in the book (in the context of an artists’ squat known as 59 Rivoli), to be a term that French law “defines […] negatively, as a structure allowing for the bypassing of obligations associated with actual leases.”

Feldman left Paris in the summer of 2015, about three months before I would arrive for the first time and begin to learn French myself. I was less sophisticated than Feldman, quite unaware of what the word “squat” meant in English, let alone in French (a joke, since the French use the same word for it). I arrived with a gridded journal and a stutter previously thought to be extinct but, to my horror, resuscitated in French, where I had, I figured, returned to adolescence. The dud of “de rien” made my cheeks hot at the end of every little exchange. I lived in Paris for two years, during which time I bought many books, read a few of them, maintained lists of unknown words, translated my first short story, and shared a rented apartment with a blue door, for which I paid 700 euros a month.

Last year, missing Paris as I do all the time, myself no more than a cliché wrapped in a blanket in a rented apartment in a different, colder city, I began watching episodes of The Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties (2020– ), a reality show that follows a French family business that specializes in luxury real estate—which is to say, the total political and material opposite of a squat. The show allowed me to peer into Parisian apartments and learn the words for “molding” and various kinds of marble. Each episode was a lesson in French vocabulary specific to apartments no one I knew would ever be able to purchase, or even visit. It was my sentimental education; it was my Paris document—or, at least, my Paris docusoap.

¤

As I attempt writing about Jacqueline Feldman’s attempts at exhausting a squat in Paris, wildfires are ravaging the landscape and real estate of Los Angeles. Destroyed—already destined to be the adjectival understatement of the year—are entire neighborhoods and vistas whose names I didn’t know until recently, because after I watched all the episodes of The Parisian Agency, I moved on to Selling Sunset (2019– ), another real estate reality show, filmed in L.A., in which the homes are significantly more expensive, newer, uglier, but, like the Parisian ones, frequently vacant for absurd swaths of the year. Much less domestic vocabulary is employed than in the French counterpart, but of course, since the whole thing is in English, that doesn’t make much of a difference in my education. I’ve stopped learning—or, rather, I’ve started learning key terms of Los Angeles instead: “canyon,” “valley,” “boulevard.”

Why am I stretching this review to include the present climate catastrophe? Because it is a crucial subject of Precarious Lease. Feldman chose to write and live alongside people who, every day, were making the choice and taking the risk to live precariously in order to dramatize and protest social inequalities, waste, and exploitation. In providing a short history of French squats, Feldman cites political scientist Cécile Péchu, who studied the French group Droit au logement (Right to Housing) and came away with the conclusion that the squat is rather excellent as a political action or means of protest: It “constitutes, de facto, an answer to the demand it makes.”

The book’s epigraph is in French, untranslated and unattributed: “chercher et savoir reconnaître qui et quoi, au milieu de l’enfer, n’est pas l’enfer, et le faire durer, et lui faire de la place.” A quick Google search revealed that this is from the French translation of Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino. Ah, bien sûr—Feldman chronicles her reading of this novel toward the end of her project, feeling shame in seemingly wasting time until she begins to understand Calvino’s book as part of her project. The English, in William Weaver’s translation, reads: “[S]eek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

In a line of characteristic wit and economy, Feldman writes that “the beauty of Le Bloc was not that it took in everyone, but that it took in anyone; a failure was that it could not take in everyone.” Precarious Lease, on the other hand, takes in everyone, and is gracious and radical in its vision. Necessary, too, because, in July 2023, an “anti-squat law” was passed in France, thus “consign[ing] all this, [Feldman’s] story and its possibility, to history.” What luck, then, to have her account—Precarious Lease is a stunning work of witness. And in the midst of the present inferno, it is precisely the rigorous work of fact-checked nonfiction that so effectively makes plain the head-spinning fictions of real estate and property value.