Alexandre Labruffe

This essay reads Alexandre Labruffe's "Chroniques d'une station-service" (éds. Verticales, 2019) as a radical recoding of the novel, moving towards a poetics of the ephemeral: at its center is a Parisian gas station, which functions not merely as a setting, but as a form of perception and writing. From the perspective of an unnamed gas station attendant, a network of micro-scenes, fragmentary observations, and loosely connected narrative threads unfolds—for example, when a drunken customer desperately calls out for the poets while his walk to the "limping flamingo" is distorted on the surveillance monitors; when, at night, the mooing of a cow from a cattle truck swells into an unexpectedly lyrical scene in the fog; or when the flickering neon sign "HORIZON" gradually loses its letters, causing the place itself to tip into oblivion. The study demonstrates how formal fragmentation, mediated perception (surveillance images, screens, codes), and the cyclical structure of time generate an aesthetics of transition in which consumption, desire, and apocalyptic imagination intertwine. Drawing on concepts of the "non-place," the gas station becomes legible as the paradoxical center of a globalized transit world, where subjectivity is constituted only as a fleeting registration of signs. At the same time, the essay explores the autopoetological dimension of the text: the loss of the author's own manuscript becomes the poetic matrix of a novel that stages itself as a fragment and a remnant. Thus, Labruffe's debut emerges as a melancholic-ironic reflection on the conditions of storytelling in late capitalism.