Precarious Lease

by Jacqueline Feldman

An account of a Parisian squat in the journalistic tradition of Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell, and an examination of the City of Lights and its ideas.

At a far edge of Paris where the banlieue began stood Le Bloc: a squat, or an occupied building. Eight stories tall and four basements deep, it took in artists as well as immigrants to France from various corners of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Eviction threatened them all, and their story, told in poetically delicate, gripping narrative, animates an inquiry into exclusion from the city, conditions of artistic production within a city, and the basis of any right to a space.

These squatters' experiment carries echoes of the city's revolutionary and bohemian past. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and other chroniclers of Paris, Feldman, an American essayist, draws on this history even as she raises questions of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, ecology and the possibilities left for writing the City of Lights.

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Essays

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 14, 2020

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating as a snapshot of France’s once-thriving squatter subculture centred on the brief lifespan of art squat Le BLOC - Batiment Libre, Occupation Citoyenne (Free Building – Public-Spirited Occupation). Le BLOC was sited in a former government building erected in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris. The building was a vast echoing space, several storeys high with basement floors stretching down below it. It was opened up as a squat in November 2012 becoming a home and/or studio space to at least 200 from graffiti artists to more traditional art practitioners. American Writer and researcher Jaqueline Feldman, who moved to Paris to carry out a funded project on squatting, charts Le BLOC’s history through her interactions with numerous inhabitants.

It’s an unorthodox piece, a somewhat fragmented, intricately-structured blend of memoir and sociological study incorporating aspects of Feldmans’s fieldwork and personal experience. Feldman attempts to situate Le BLOC within France’s countercultural past and present, linking it to forms of popular protest dating back to the Paris Commune. She uses the now-legendary Le BLOC to reflect on squatting as a political and practical phenomenon – from its manifestation as a signifier of urban exclusion and the growing numbers of unhoused to the use of takeaway receipts to establish occupation. Although Feldman’s assessment of squatting’s roots in the precarious environments spawned by contemporary capitalism can be overly oblique. This is partly because of Feldman’s tendency to focus on specific characters living in Le BLOC rather than broader political movements and issues.

Feldman references overtly-political campaigning collectives like Jeudi Noir but, disappointingly, doesn’t really delve into their operations or those of the influential Droit Au Logement (DAL – Right to Housing). Feldman’s decision to adopt a more intimate approach to her subject matter can render this evocative and moving but it can be dense and meandering too. It’s also in danger of making the Paris squatting scene appear oddly individualistic unlike, for example, its British counterparts typified by the activists and anarcho-punks who founded groups like the Dole House Crew. The Crew took over unused public buildings in Peckham in London in the 1980s and 90s repurposing them as artistic and social spaces. Remnants of the Crew’s actions can be glimpsed in the squatter aesthetic adopted by Peckham’s later influx of gentrifiers who’ve appropriated and commercialised its practices with events like concerts in car parks, and bars designed to resemble the Crew’s ad hoc, community-centred spaces. So, for me worthwhile but slippery and slightly frustrating at times.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could and should be a cool book but like other reviewers have noted it is ultimately half baked. There’s no engagement with wider movements, it feels like a lot is left out, and she focusses on random characters but even then sort of inexpertly. These people in this book are vague, the crop up and recur but I didn’t get a good sense of any of them except perhaps the Russians. The Guernica piece is much better but even that I found to be of average quality. Reads mostly like a rich kid, who believes she’s not rich because she knows richer kids, got a Fulbright and kind of vibed it out. Seems like she’s using “literary” as a cover for “unfocused mess.” Multiple times she mentions an interview without actually getting into it, for instance the ton ton who she said she interviews for five hours. This amounts to two paragraphs, but then for some reason we get three pages on “I have a boyfriend and I read a book that I won’t get into”? Right place right time but an uninspiring writer who ultimately fumbled the bag. I get the sense that she’s just lazy? Also, girl, you love the word ‘capacious’ get a thesaurus.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

-(3.7)
-an interesting juxtaposition between the privilege of the author’s background, of the circumstances that brought her over to Paris and the topic she researches- author handles this well, with thoughtful reflections- she also does a good job of explaining the intricate policies around squatting in France, the connection to art and the study of culture
-did get a little repetitive towards the end, dragged somewhat

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

With thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo for the arc.

In this non-fiction work, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a renowned squat near the Banlieue region of Paris, and of the many and varied people who inhabit the area.
Feldman’s writing is engaging and provides an accessible glimpse of the histories, lifestyles, thoughts and occupations of this often-overlooked or marginalised section of society. Through a series of vignettes and anecdotes the reader is given a glimpse into a counterculture that is under threat from modernity and late-stage capitalism.
I would have liked to have seen a little more socio-political analysis to add depth to the observations, but overall this was an interesting and important record of a section of French society that is increasingly under-threat.

[Charlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book comes at a weird midway between trying to be journalistic (whilst simultaneously not fully informing the reader of enough history, past or present, of squatting in Paris) and trying to be written like a novel/story (while lacking a lot of the fun and imagination that comes with a good novel(even if within the constraints of fact). The reader feels deprived, as Feldman withholds supposed years of documentation and field research, cropped down to very short bits and pieces in the book: it seems she could not decide what her work should be, and tries to conceal it's inadequacies in vagueness.

A fascinating topic that could have been a staple in its field, but gets bogged down by a narrator who is both self-aware and not self-aware enough/the author's own upper-middle-class American experience of 'slumming it' in Paris.

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must be totally honest: I came to read this book with really high expectations and there was no chance that the real book could meet them. However, Precarious Lease, the first person account of a Parisian squat's short lived glories, is an interesting but somehow uncooked recollection of events. The fragmentary structure, even though it feels somehow appropriate, is a bit confusing, and the balance between memori and essay, biography and facts is often off. I could not pinpoint the exact reason why the book often feels underwhelming, especially because it works in so many different ways, however the feeling is of a book that is somehow both too long and too short, uncooked and overcooked.

[Eric Owski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Precarious Lease is a fascinating project. A mix of reportage and memoir, a window into a world 'inside the margin of the margin of society.' Feldman's treatment of Le Bloc's residents and culture is sympathetic, but also not romanticized and the fragmentary and non-systematic nature of the book feels entirely appropriate to its subject matter. Feldman presents Le Bloc on its own terms and resists the temptation to essentialize it. I think Precarious Lease is best read in a similar spirit.

[Stefano Zuppet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great attempt - exciting and insightful in parts with selected stories / characters that “touch” you YET for the majority overlong and overwritten

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feldman's reportage of the life within a Parisian squat feels absolutely modern as she mixes history, journalism and something more essayistic. Drawing on Paris' bohemian history together with an absolutely of-the-moment eye on current concerns about late stage capitalism, precarity, the ideological values cohering around housing, immigration and possession(s), this gives itself the space to think about pressing concerns within a structured narrative.

Like those 'short introduction' books, this delves into the broad history of squatting with unexpected insights. It also looks beneath any kind of convenient stereotypes and dismisses them easily in recounting the lives and artistic endeavours of the community that coheres around an abandoned 8-storey building. Without glamorising precarious lifestyles - and not everyone has the choice that that implies - this does dare to imagine alternative lifestyles and ways of living. A penetrating look at life on the margins of the known city.

Many thanks to Fitzcarraldo for an ARC via NetGalley

[Stefanos Spyridon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A narrative midway. I liked it.