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2019 (Verticales) Alexandre Labruffe : Gas Station Chronicles

Chroniques d’une station-service (Gas Station Chronicles) gives voice to a gas-station attendant, Beauvoire, whose literary nickname does not change a thing from his daily routine: managing through the control-screens the comings and goings of drivers, dealing with the cash register or the bar. This Gas Station, located in the northern suburbs of Paris, could become the epicenter of a social drama or an adreline-fuelled robbery, but the author has preferred to make it the ideal observation tower of the modern world through the eyes of a person far from ordinary. With his contemplative attitude, Beauvoire scrutinizes and comments on the apparent inertia of everyday life. He tracks bits of transcendence or involuntary poetry in the speeches and attitudes of customers. Hence the amused or even diverted references of our gas-station philosopher to the writings of Jean Baudrillard or to a biography of Scott Fitzgerald, as well as the erudite debates with his friend Nietzland during their endless board-games.

Turning the art of brief into an authentic novel, tender and caustic, Chroniques d’une station-service is an attempt to exhaust the possibilities of a typical ‘non-place’, of a society in lack of inner-fuel and true meaning. Through small impressionist touches, the author explores the field of sub-ordinary life, with its failures and pretenses, to extract the raw material of a vivid and funny imagination.

It is a real pleasure to read, a dazzling discovery, at the same time as a cry for help. — Le Figaro

J'ai énormément ri - F. Beigbeder (Le Masque et la Plume)