Autumn in Peking
Autumn in Peking () is a 1947 novel by the French writer Boris Vian. It was published by Jean d’Halluin's Éditions du Scorpion in 1947 with a second edition (revised by the author) at Éditions de Minuit in 1956 which had a drawing by Mose on the cover. It was reissued in 1963 and reprinted a number of times. The French critic Bruno Maillé has described it as a surrealist novel, something the surrealists themselves refuted. However, Alistair Rolls in his study of intertextuality in four novels of Boris Vian argues the novel contains many surrealist elements and techniques. The Peking (or Beijing) of the title is not literal; if anywhere the location of the novel's main action is a “dream-desert” allowing Vian to play with visual extremes of searing light and heat as well as intense blackness and night. It takes place in an imaginary desert called Exopotamie where a train station and a railway line are under construction. Pestereaux argued that Peking was simply slang for Paris; an allegory of Paris post WW2 reconstruction and the insanity of its bureaucracy. Autumn in Peking was written in 1946, a prolific year for Vian, in which he wrote three novels,