Selected for the Prix de Flore and rewarded with the Maison rouge award, Chroniques d'un service-station , published by Verticales, was noticed in this literary season. Nicolas Carreau tells you at the microphone of Europe 1 why this first novel by Alexandre Labruffe seduced him.
Chronicles of a service station, these are small stories told by a pump attendant. He waits for the customers behind his counter and watches the film Mad Max , which prophesies the end of the oil, to deceive the boredom. At the beginning of the book, he studies the dilapidated blue neon blinking in front of him. Because the hero observes and tells what he sees: the little family coming out of the Renault Espace, the VRP, the truckers. He is sometimes poetic, sometimes a little philosopher or accountant when he tries to calculate the number of liters of Coca-Zero he has sold since taking office - 455,000 liters.
"Re-enchant" service stations
"There is nothing more beautiful and poetic than a service station and at the same time nothing more terrifying, says the author Alexandre Labruffe, questioned by Nicolas Carreau.I wanted to re-enchant it by making it the place of possibilities, a place of observation of the world by a pump attendant, which is out of phase ".
Throughout the pages, all social classes and all types of characters intersect. The reader watches the world through the eyes of the attendant. Funny often, profound without seeming to be, this novel embeds us in the ravings of the hero, in his dreams and in a kind of motionless journey.