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Constructing and deconstructing living
Both of Joy Sorman's texts revolve around the same question – what does it mean to live? – but they present it from opposite perspectives. Big work (2009, cited as OEU) approaches housing as an act of making, building, inventing: The thirteen episodes show people fighting for, constructing, occupying, furnishing, or, in extreme cases, piecing together their habitat from waste materials. L'inhabitable (2016, cited as INH), on the other hand, approaches dwelling from the perspective of its negation: The dilapidated building, no longer habitable, becomes the prism through which the conditions of dwelling first become visible. One thesis of the following essay is: Both texts form a complementary diptych that understands dwelling as a practice that is simultaneously material, affective, social, and linguistic; OEU explores dwelling as a constructive process (unfinished building, possibility, utopia), INH as a deconstructive finding (decay, loss, threshold). Together, they develop a poetics of the unfinished: The home is never finished, always already in the process of becoming or already in the process of disintegration. The following guiding questions structure the analysis: How do both texts construct their spatial and temporal structure in such a way that dwelling appears as a dynamic, never-ending state? Which constellations of characters and forms of communication are mobilized to unlock the social dimension of the habitat? Which metaphorical fields organize the semantic structure of both texts, and how do they relate to each other? Finally: What do the beginning and end of the novel reveal about the autopoetological dimension of Sorman's writing project?
Joy Sorman is a distinctive voice in contemporary French literature, whose work often lies at the intersection of sociology, documentary, and fiction. Born in Paris in 1973, she initially began her career as a philosophy teacher before publishing her debut novel in 2005 (Boys, Boys, Boys) won the Prix Flore. A central pillar of her work is her membership in the collective "Inculte," founded in 2004. This group of authors (including names like Maylis de Kerangal, Mathias Enard, and Arno Bertina) is committed to a literature characterized by intensive research, formal experimentation, and a departure from the classic, self-referential novel. Sorman's writing is shaped by this collective dynamic: she cultivates a precise, almost clinical view of social realities, whether in her exploration of craft professions or the precarious conditions of housing. Her texts are less psychological portraits than phenomenological explorations that dissect the relationship between the human body and its environment and the institutions surrounding it.
Big work (2009)
Joy Sorman's OEU brings together thirteen episodic portraits of diverse forms and practices of living, which together create a provisional phenomenology of habitat. The book opens with Sam, a self-taught craftsman of Algerian origin, who spends twenty-five years building his own house in the south of France. This founding narrative establishes the central questions of the volume: What does it mean to construct a building with one's own hands? What freedoms and obstacles does one encounter when choosing not to live according to the developers' model? Sam's project is simultaneously a physical practice and a philosophical rebellion against the standardization of housing.
The following chapters traverse a broad spectrum: a single woman, in ironic self-observation, considers buying a mobile home and parking it on a vacant lot in the Goutte-d'Or district; a Japanese office worker, Akira, living in a capsule apartment in Tokyo's Nakagin Tower; migrants in the forests around Calais, constructing makeshift shelters from plastic sheeting, pallets, and cardboard; migrant workers on scaffolding; and Sinti and Roma, whose mobile living fundamentally contradicts the French concept of "chez soi" (at home). Each chapter is a self-contained miniature portrait, composed of sober inventory and associative reflection.
Structurally, the book is not a conventional narrative, but a mosaic of reportage, essay, and fiction. A narrator, sometimes named, sometimes anonymous—recognizable as the author's alter ego—navigates the scenes as a curious observer who occasionally becomes a protagonist herself (especially in the chapters on celibacy). The tone shifts between precise objectivity when technical details of the building's structure are discussed, and a lyrically charged language when the affective dimension of living takes center stage. The chapter "Gros œuvre," which gives the book its title, articulates the fundamental ambivalence: the unfinished building is the framework that hints at the possibility of living without yet fulfilling it.
In the final section, the chapter "La conquête de l'Ouest" (The Conquest of the West), the text returns to the communal dimension: The architecture collective Exyzt has occupied scaffolding structures in Paris and Barcelona as temporary housing projects. These utopias of collective, ephemeral living form the antithesis to Sam's individual house construction. The text does not end with an arrival, but with a movement, a remembering: "pendant un été on ne fut jamais seul" – summer as the only complete living experience, already past in its execution.
L'inhabitable (2016)
INH was first published in 2011 in a Pavillon de l'Arsenal anthology in co-publication with Éditions Alternatives, before being released in 2016 – in a revised and expanded version – by Gallimard (L'arbalète). The text documents Joy Sorman's fieldwork in six dilapidated Parisian buildings slated for demolition, whose residents must be relocated. The narrator visits furnished apartments and overcrowded courtyards in the 10th and 20th arrondissements, accompanying social workers, health officials, and city inspectors. She meets Amine, an Algerian construction worker who has lived for thirty years in a waterlogged room in the Faubourg-du-Temple, the roof of which has been damaged since the 1999 storm; she sees children on Rue Ramponneau suffering from lead poisoning because the lead-based white paint is peeling from the walls.
The structural principle of the book is doubling: After each portrait of a run-down place, there is a chapter titled "Cinq ans plus tard" (or "Cinq ans après") in which the narrator returns to the same address. What she finds there is not simply "better" living, but a different set of problems: The new social housing units are bright and clean, but the old communities are fragmented. Amine and Ziane, who had called each other brothers in their misery, are housed separately. The Sidibé family, originally from Senegal, lives in a new four-room apartment, but cannot stop barricading the windows and blocking the vents with plastic bags, as if their bodies could not forget the old language of protection against cold and damp.
The text culminates in an epilogue chapter, "Le Relogement" (Relocation), which analyzes the administrative and affective complexities of resettlement. Learning to live, according to Sorman's thesis, is not a passive process. The Sidibés do not speak of "chez nous" (at our place) – they still lack the pronoun of ownership; they say "ici" (here) and "le nouveau logement" (the new dwelling). Between handing over the key to their misery and receiving the key to the new lies a liminal state, which finds its literary expression in the image of life opened up – "la vie qui s'ouvre devant soi comme une béance heureuse et insondable" (life opening before itself like a happy and insensible yawn). The yawn, the void, the yawn: home is not yet home, but it is a possibility.
Formally, INH lies at the boundary between reportage and literature. The narrator is decidedly present, physically perceiving, but she does not assume a judge's role. The text summarizes statistical data ("40% of households in dilapidated housing have less than 300 euros per month") with sensual precision. It quotes official definitions of dilapidation ("insalubrité") as an opening—bureaucratic discourse material that is immediately countered by literary perception.
Living and Speaking
The constellation of characters in both texts follows a structural asymmetry between observer and observed, which, however, is resolved differently. In OEU, the narrator does not always assume the same role: In the chapters about Sam, she appears as a detached biographer who manages technical details with narrative precision. In the Célibataire episodes, however, the narrator appears as a first-person character who herself wants to buy a mobile home, lives on a vacant lot in the Goutte-d'Or, and observes the ruins opposite with binoculars. This dual role—the narrator as both writer and resident—creates a reflexive tension: Living and writing are conceived as analogous activities.
In INH, the relationship is different. The narrator is always a visitor, an outsider who gains access to the sites of misery through institutional channels—accompanied by Annie, the SIEMP nurse, by social workers, by city inspectors. The residents speak, but their voices are filtered, transformed into free indirect discourse, or quoted directly (set in italics, in a linguistically marked sociolect that makes the foreign audible within the familiar). Amine says: “La France, on ne parlait que de ça chez moi en Algérie, et moi je suis arrivé ici, je suis arrivé au 125, et sur les chantiers, et j'ai dit : c'est ça la France!?” This question, typographically marked as a foreign voice through italics, is simultaneously the rhetorical condensation of an entire migration narrative.
Communication in OEU unfolds as a conversation between writer and craftsman, as a monologue of the self (Sam), as the narrator's associative meandering. The dialogue between Jean-Jacques, the mobile home salesman, and the narrator in Célibataire I is an exemplary scene: the conversation is simultaneously market-like and philosophical, and the salesman's technical language ("Phaltex," "polystyrene," "iso thermique") is translated by the narrator into the register of the existential. In INH, on the other hand, the format of the interview, the clinical diagnosis, the official decree dominates: communication is administratively coded, and the literary gesture consists of penetrating this code and making the life behind it visible. Both texts share the awareness that language is an instrument of power in housing: who is allowed to speak and how is always also the question of who is allowed to live and how.
Formal mobility
OEU employs an unstable, shifting narrative perspective that alternates between free indirect discourse, third-person narration (for characters like Sam or Akira), and first-person narration (for the Célibataire episodes). This formal mobility is not arbitrary but semantically motivated: the act of narration reflects dwelling. Just as the book has no character who permanently settles in a fixed abode, the narrative perspective knows no fixed location. The thirteen episodes are like thirteen apartments through which the text moves, each with its own light, its own sound, its own silence.
INH is organized alternately in the third and first person, but the dominant stance is that of the ethnographic observer. Its proximity to the reportage format is programmatic: Sorman situates her text within the paratext as an “experiment at the frontiers of reportage and narrative, of investigation and urban drift.” The narrative structure follows a logic of doubling (visit/return after five years), which is essentially a temporal structure: what was dilapidated then is now social housing—but what was gained, what was lost? The five-year period is a deliberately non-clinical timeframe: long enough for real change, short enough for the memory to remain physically palpable.
In OEU, the narrative structure follows a different logic: not return, but accumulation. Thirteen forms of dwelling are juxtaposed without hierarchy or genealogical link—the migrants' hut in Calais exists on the same textual level as Akira's capsule in Tokyo or Sam's self-built house. This parataxis is a poetic statement: no mode of dwelling is more original or valuable than another. The text thus rejects an evolutionary reading (from the primitive to the civilized) and instead presents a synchronic cartography of dwelling that considers all forms simultaneously.
Shell construction phase and the archaeology of housing
Space in OEU is consistently conceived as a process, as becoming, as unfinished. The title word, "gros œuvre," refers in construction to the shell construction phase: foundation, load-bearing walls, roof truss—everything that ensures the building's stability but does not yet constitute a habitable space. This metaphor is the organizational matrix of the entire volume: each of the thirteen housing forms is a shell, a transitional state, not a definitive place. The cabins from Calais are literally temporary structures, ready to be burned down at any time. Akira's capsule is technically finished, but existentially incomplete (he cries, bangs on the window, wants to escape). Sam's house takes twenty-five years to be "finished"—and even then, the text asks whether habitation is ever truly "finished": "Est-ce que habiter cela va de soi?"
In INH, space is conceived as a palimpsest. The dilapidated building layers times upon one another: the wallpaper, hanging in tatters from the walls, reveals layer upon layer of former inhabitants, former decor, former lives. This image of the palimpsest recurs in both texts, as if it were the shared depth image of Sorman's spatial poetics. The ruins in the Goutte-d'Or, which the narrator observes with binoculars from her mobile home, are a similar construct: "vue sur ces cubes de vies révolues mis à nu," an archaeology of dwelling made visible. Space in INH is always one whose visibility is only made possible through decay: the interior of the house only becomes visible when the facade is gone.
In both texts, the temporal structure follows a tension between permanence and ephemerality. In OEU, the time spent in dwelling is always threatened: the utopias of the Exyzt collective last "a few weeks," the huts in Calais are burned down, Akira's capsule is a temporary solution. Only Sam's house has claimed permanence, and even this is relative: twenty-five years of construction, then the wonder of whether one can truly "arrive." In INH, time is structured by the mechanism of return. The five years between the first and second visits constitute a waiting period for discourse: Sorman allows space for change without prejudging the outcome. Here, time is not narratively structured (as tension and resolution) but documentaryally open: what was is different; what is different is not necessarily better.
threshold and boundary
The semantic field that most profoundly permeates both texts is that of the body. For Sorman, dwelling is always conceived as a physical process, as in Sam's work: “imprimer ma forme – mes contours précis, humains, mon ventre rebondi, mes épaules tombantes – à un espace indéterminé” – the apartment is the imprint of the body, its negative. In INH, the inhabitants are physically ill (asthma, lead poisoning, scabies) – the pathology of the apartment directly affects the bodies of its inhabitants. The body as a medium between inside and outside, between the individual and their habitat, is the connecting metaphorical field of both texts. For Sorman, dwelling is always a physical act: lying down, washing, protecting oneself, exerting oneself.
A second area of focus is that of construction and craftsmanship. In OEU, building technology becomes poetic material: concrete, formwork, masonry, Layher scaffolding, Phaltex floors. The technical language of craftsmanship is not mere documentary embellishment, but a semantic register in its own right, embodying an ethic of concrete work. In INH, the same area reappears with a negative connotation: the steel supports that temporarily prop up the hazardous building in the Faubourg-du-Temple are compared to a prosthesis in an injured leg ("comme une attelle, une broche dans une jambe blessée qui ne peut plus rien porter"). The craft of construction and the craft of repair are mirror images of each other: building and supporting, erecting and maintaining.
A third theme, more prominent in OEU but also appearing in INH, is that of nature and wildlife. The huts in Calais lie in a “maquis,” a wilderness; the migrants themselves call their dwellings “jungle”—a word that encapsulates the gap between what the West defines as wilderness and what these people experience as their imposed habitat. The jungle metaphor is a postcolonial echo chamber: those who expected France to be “paradise” (Amine: “you’ll see, it’s paradise there”) find themselves in a wilderness managed by those who designated it as such.
Finally, there is the semantic field of the border and the liminal state. In OEU, it appears in the figure of the unfinished building (everything is still a boundary between outside and inside), in the mobile home (which is simultaneously house and vehicle, neither entirely settled nor entirely nomadic), in Akira's capsule (an object on the edge of habitability, where cell, cabin, and apartment coincide). In INH, the threshold is literally present: the narrator describes it: the relocated inhabitants "mark a pause on the threshold"—the pause on the doorstep is the moment when the new living begins, but has not yet begun. Threshold, unfinished building, border: these are the fundamental topographical concepts of Sorman's entire housing project.
The absence of the facade
Sorman's texts are formal hybrids that subvert literary genre boundaries as well as the boundaries of dwelling. OEU calls itself neither a novel nor non-fiction: the publisher places it in a zone between reportage and essayistic prose. INH was initially part of an architecture book (with photographs and an architectural essay) before succeeding as an autonomous literary work—this genesis is not a marginal detail, but rather points to the programmatic intermediality of the text. Sorman is interested in dwelling not only as a theme, but also as a writing form: the book itself is a house, and like a house, it comes into being through layering, additions, and revisions.
The autopoetic dimension is most explicit in OEU in the Célibataire episodes. The narrator, observing the ruins opposite with binoculars from the window of her mobile home, is a character created by the writer herself: she sees the interior of the abandoned apartments (wallpaper, floors, remnants of furniture), and this view is an image of the literary gaze—the glimpse into the heart of things, possible only when the facade is absent. The absence of the facade is a metaphor for Sorman's poetics: she always writes about what is normally hidden (private living spaces, unseen arms, bodies within apartments), and she does so by gaining physical access—fieldwork is part of her literary method.
In INH, autopoetics is less explicit, but no less present. The text refers to its own genesis: it began as fieldwork, became the first published text (2011), and then returned as a revised version (2016) with the "Cinq ans plus tard" chapters. The doubling structure (visit/return) is not only a documentation strategy, but also an autopoetic statement: literature about dwelling cannot be unique, complete, definitive—it must return, revisit, correct, expand. The book as a dwelling that one leaves and revisits, in which one continually finds new traces.
The sentence with which OEU formulates its own project in the blurb is simultaneously a programmatic statement: “OEU recounts 13 habitations en crise, précaires, ingénieuses, mobiles ou bricolées : autant de manières d'investir un lieu, de construire sa maison.” The verb “investir” contains both meanings: a place is occupied and simultaneously invested in, charged with energy and meaning. And “bricolées”—the patchwork, the improvised tinkering—is not a derogatory term for Sorman, but an aesthetic category: Bricolage is the original form of architecture, the building of the necessary.
Paradigms of living
Both texts are rich in implicit and explicit intertextual references. OEU draws on the discourse of modernism and avant-garde architecture: The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa and opened in 1972, is a real building of the Metabolism movement, which applied organic and industrial growth models to urban planning. Sorman treats the building not as a curiosity, but as a paradigm: the module as the basic unit of living, detachable, replaceable, neutral. The reference to Le Corbusier's "Machine à Habiter" is implicit, but appears in the chapter heading "Habitation Machine"—the machine that lives, or the machine for living.
On a philosophical level, OEU resonates with Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space (The Poetics of Space, 1957), particularly with his thesis that the house is man's first world, a body of images. But Sorman reverses this thesis: she is not interested in the idyllic, contemplative retreat that Bachelard describes, but in the house as a battleground, as an unfinished sketch, as a social conflict. Sam's sentence "Ne me dites pas comment habiter, vous n'avez pas le droit" is a direct reply to the normative housing ideal of postwar modernism.
The title INH alludes to the philosophical concept of the inhabitable, which was discussed by Marc Augé (as a counter-concept to the "non-lieu") and in the architectural debate after World War II. The definition of insalubrité, which opens the text as an epigraph, is not a literary reference but an administrative text—and therein lies an intertextual gesture: the bureaucracy of description becomes the backdrop against which literary language writes. This technique of using official or medical texts as counter-material is also familiar from the socio-literature of Didier Eribon or Annie Ernaux; Sorman shares with these authors an interest in the visible forms of social invisibility.
Aftermath and Advance
The beginning of OEU is telling: “D'abord il ya eu le trou à creuser pour les fondations, en plein cagnard, 36 degrés sur la dalle du mois d'août qui réverbère, sacs de plâtre de 50 kilos sur l'épaule…” The text begins in medias res, in the most physical of all phases of house construction: the foundation is being dug. The syntactic structure is an accumulation of infinitive constructions (“creuser”, “charger”, “couler”, “fabriquer”) that strings the actions together without hierarchical order, without a concluding verb. This opening is programmatic: the text functions like the laying of a foundation; it begins without announcement and without commenting on itself. The reader is thrown into the work, just as Sam was thrown into the hole.
The ending of OEU is elegiac and permeated by a strange melancholy. The text concludes with a memory of summer spent within the framework of Exyzt: “pendant un été on ne fut jamais seul… on se souvint non pas exactement de ce qu'on y fit, mais plutôt d'une qualité de l'air, des rapports et des sons, le corps gardant encore en mémoire, incisés, quelques stigmates de la frénésie d'alors ; et j'y étais.” Memory as dwelling: not the place, but the quality of the air, the relationships, the sounds. The house as sensory memory preserved by the body. This concluding sequence is both a summary and a farewell: summer is over, the utopia too, but the inscription remains.
INH begins with a definition: The first sentence is not literary, but administrative and legal (“Insalubrité: un logement est déclaré insalubre à partir du moment où son état de dégradation peut avoir des effets dangereux sur la santé de ses occupants”). This opening is a process of alienation: Dwelling is initially defined by its bureaucratic pathology before literary language reclaims it. The definition creates a void, a non-dwelling, which the entire text then attempts to fill. Just as INH begins, so too does insalubry itself begin: with an act of naming, of ascertaining, of marking as diseased.
The ending of INH is an image of great poetic power: The relocated residents—with their children, their few belongings, their rented van—"mark a pause on the doorstep, then the light entering through the glass bay, the white blinding the walls, a diffuse warmth, and life opening before itself like a happy and inaudible yawn." The word "yawn" is rich in meaning: It signifies both a yawn, an empty space, and an opening. Their new home is neither pain nor happiness alone, but an opening that doesn't yet know what it is. Life as a yawn: a home that is yet to be created. The end of INH is not an arrival, but a threshold.
The juxtaposition of these two conclusions is illuminating: OEU ends with the past, with what is remembered (“and I was there”), INH with the future as an open promise. In both cases, dwelling is not a completed state, but a temporal mode: dwelling is either already over (leaving physical traces) or has not yet begun (and unfolds as Béance). The entire project of Sorman's literature on dwelling moves between these two temporalities—the nostalgic echo and the utopian leap.
The dignity of dwelling
Joy Sorman writes about dwelling in the same way that dwelling itself functions: never finished, always in flux, always on the brink. OEU and INH are not parables about the misery of the housing shortage or hymns to the creativity of the poor. They are something more complex: intricate cartographies of dwelling as a fundamental human practice, simultaneously considering the social, material, affective, and linguistic dimensions of this act. The title of OEU—the shell—and the title of INH—the uninhabitable—mark two poles between which dwelling actually takes place: the unfinished and the no longer possible. Together, they form the parameters of a literary project that understands dwelling as the other of thought: the concrete, the corporeal, the incalculable.
The shared poetics of both texts could be described as a poetics of materiality. Sorman's language is never ethereal or abstract: she lists building materials (Phaltex, polystyrene, galvanized steel), she catalogs objects in Akira's capsule (telephone, television, air conditioner), she records the objects in Amine's room (gas stove with a torn hose, plastic sheeting on the ceiling, basins on the floor). These material inventories are not a naturalistic documentation, but a literary gesture: the objects of dwelling are also witnesses to dwelling; they carry within them the history of their users. For Sorman, dwelling is always also living together with one's own things.
Perhaps the deepest theme in both texts is that of dignity. In OEU, dignity is linked to self-determination in housing: those who build their own houses (Sam), those who take a capsule to avoid going home (Akira), those who construct a cabin from pallets and tarpaulins (the migrants in Calais) – all perform an act of self-assertion against a world that wants to assign them a standardized space. In INH, dignity is linked to recognition: the narrator does not view the inhabitants living in squalid conditions as victims, but as people who have inhabited their living spaces with creativity and tenacity, and whose move to a clean apartment can paradoxically represent a loss. Ziane says: “ici on est bien et malheureux” – and this sentence is the most concise formulation of Sorman’s entire thesis: housing is not simply a problem that can be solved. It is a contradiction that must be endured.
Ultimately, both texts demonstrate that dwelling is a linguistic question. Those who can call their place "chez moi" (at my place) possess something the Sidibés do not yet have: a pronominal right to home, the language of ownership. Those who call their place "la jungle" (and thus internalize the gaze of others upon themselves) have a different language. And those who, like Sam, say "Ceci est mon corps et il a besoin de s'asseoir, s'étendre, se laver" (This is my body and it needs to sit, stretch, wash) speak of dwelling as a fundamental biological right, not a luxury. Between these linguistic registers—the administrative, the biopolitical, the poetic, the clandestine—both of Sorman's texts move with rare agility. Their contribution to the literature of dwelling lies not in the answers they offer, but in the quality of the questions they pose: What does a body need? How much space does a person have? When is a place a home? And: Can dwelling ever truly be written?
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
