In recent years, social workers have raised concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor: though employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so undercompensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. 

In No Fixed Abode, Marc Augé’s pathbreaking fictional ethnography—published recently  in English by Seagull Books, translated from the French by Chris Turner—Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafes, but at night he takes shelter in his car. We see a progressive erosion of Henri’s identity, a loss of bearings, and a slow degeneration of his ability to relate to others. 

But then he meets the artist Dominique …

’[W]e find ourselves facing the vertigo of absolute isolation. A bitter and chilling story of the present day.‘—Le Figaro, on the French edition of No Fixed Abode.

An extract …

In the end, the dinner at the Rendez-vous didn’t go too badly. A soberer affair than last time. These artists are less bohemian than they try to make out. All they talked about this evening was their holiday plans. And I’m the civil servant! Dominique came and sat next to me. I wondered for a moment how she could be interested in me. Her interest is gratifying—why hide the fact?—but I’m at least twenty years older than she is and don’t seem particularly youthful. She sees me write but she must surely have an idea that I’m not really a writer. If that were the case then, given my lifestyle, I’d be in the category of ‘failed author’ or ‘literary outcast’, to use a more elevated term.

Yet I intrigue her, and this evening I found out why. She guessed I was more eccentric—or madder—than I’d wanted to let on. When we left the Rendez-vous,after giving Robert and Maria a goodnight hug, some of the party decided to go and have a last drink in Montparnasse. She said she’d rather go for a little walk, took me by the arm and dragged me off into the rue des Morillons. We walked a little way towards the parc Brassens. She stopped, looked me in the eye and asked me jokily, though a slight tremor in her voice made me feel she was afraid of touching on a taboo, of ‘overstepping the mark’, as the cliché-mongers put it: ‘So are you going to show me your fine Mercedes?’ I pretended not to understand and I wasn’t, in fact, sure what she was getting at. I replied that it was an old car of no interest whatever but she drove home her point: ‘Big enough for you to live in all the same!’

‘I’m sorry,’ she went on. ‘The other night I was feeling down in the dumps in my room and went out to get some air. I was wandering round haphazardly and came to a street—I forget the name or, rather, I’ve never known its name—the one that runs alongside the tracks at Montparnasse station and, from a distance, I saw you get into your car. Since the car didn’t start, I came closer and it didn’t take long to see you were settling down for the night there. I didn’t dare show myself.’

‘It’s the rue Fondary,’ I said, for something to say.

‘Is that right?’

She fell silent for a moment, a faint smile playing on her lips.

‘Do you know, it’s one of my longstanding fantasies to live in a car?’