Autumn in Peking

Autumn in Peking is a novel by Boris Vian, published in 1947 and written during 1946, one of the most prolific years of the author's career, which also produced Froth on the Daydream and I Spit on Your Graves. It is one of his more serious works in intention, though it keeps the absurd humour and verbal inventiveness for which he is known.

The action takes place in an imaginary desert called Exopotamia, where a railway station and a line are under construction. The book features engineers, lustful priests and hermits, lovelorn couples, and a doctor obsessed with model aeroplanes, alongside buses that feed on fishbones, typewriters that shiver when uncovered, and household objects that behave in unsettling ways. The central characters, Anne and Angel, are close friends; Rochelle, Anne's lover, does not return the desperate love Angel feels for her. This story of unrequited love and disillusion in the adult world links it to Froth on the Daydream, shares some characters with it, and follows a similarly melancholy course.

The title's Peking is only figurative. For the critic Pestereaux, Peking was simply slang for Paris, and the novel works as an allegory of postwar reconstruction and the absurdity of its bureaucracy. The desert itself is less a real place than a dreamlike space that lets Vian play with visual extremes: searing light and intense darkness.

Critics have debated its place in surrealism. Bruno Maillé calls it a surrealist novel, a label the surrealists themselves rejected, while Alistair Rolls argues that it contains many surrealist elements and techniques. It was the only one of Vian's serious novels to be republished during his lifetime: the 1956 Éditions de Minuit edition, revised by the author, came about on the recommendation of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who praised it as literature that could finally laugh after exhausting the range of the sinister. In 2017 Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi adapted it as a comic book.