Alfred Jarry situo la saga de su Ubú en Polonia. ( )

The story such as it is, is pretty basic, kind of like a play you know? Group of people in the desert. Bit of Kafka here and there but not too much.
Some humour, plenty of vulgarity. It is surreal but most of that is confined to the first quarter. I don't do well with surreal but in this case a lot of it was inanimate objects described like animate creatures, which is the very essence of most animation so i just pretended those parts where a cartoon :) .
The delivery of the dialogue can be quite stilted not sure if thats in the original or just the translation, which must have been a nightmare so well done Mr.Translator anyway.
Not much more to say, very Indie, its nothing amazing but i was never bored. ( )

In a slightly surreal alternative version of 1940s Paris, a disparate set of eccentric characters go off, for more or less discreditable and always satisfyingly absurd reasons, to work on the construction of a new railway line in the remote and unpopulated desert region of Exopotamie, which is somewhere near the terminus of bus route 975. The railway has no obvious purpose, and due to an unfortunate planning oversight it is going to pass through the middle of the only building for miles around, which happens to be the hotel where the construction crew are staying. Meanwhile, an archaeologist and his team are tunnelling under the whole area in a quest for ancient remains.

Set against this background is a complicated network of sexual rivalries and jealousies, gay and straight, comic and tragic. And a moderate amount of accidental death, murder, medical incompetence, model-aircraft flying, and general carnage.

It's full of social satire (even if most of the people being sent up have been forgotten by now), and often very funny at a detailed level, as the narrator's careless use of figurative language turns out to have all sorts of real-world consequences, and of course it's splendidly grotesque and ridiculous at a macro-level, but Vian also manages to draw us in to sympathise with the self-destructive obsessions of his characters.

And that title? Apparently Vian was so struck by the coincidence that neither the subject "autumn" nor the location "Peking" played any part in his novel that he felt that he had no other choice than to use this title. (I would guess that that's equally true for at least 30% of the books on my shelves, so it's perhaps a good thing that Vian's insight has not been shared by many other authors...)

The edition I read was a 1960s reissue of Vian's 1956 second edition: it's fun to see that it retains the famous anomaly of having a chapter numbered XXIII fall between chapters XI and XIII of the Second Movement. It's almost certain that this was just an oversight when Vian renumbered the chapters between the first and second editions, but Vian's sense of humour is so subtle that no-one seems to be quite prepared to second-guess him to the extent of correcting this, just in case there is a buried joke there (and of course there are theories as to what this joke might be). ( )

Esta mañana Amadís Dudu ha perdido el autobús. Tal inconveniente, lejos de resolverse normalmente, supone para Dudu el comienzo de una serie de extraordinarias aventuras que no tardarán en conducirle al gran desierto de Exopotamia. Allí, precisamente porque se trata de un desierto, Dudu entabla conocimiento con una multitud de personajes pintorescos, al tiempo que se ve involucrado en el extravagante proyecto de construcción de una línea ferroviaria. Naturalmente, ni Pekín ni el otoño tienen nada que ver con todo esto. De hecho, aquí casi nada tiene que ver con nada, y no se hace necesario que nadie saque conclusiones. No obstante, si el lector se empeña en ello, no será difícil que, a través de la delirante y cómica peripecia de Dudu, llegue a ese centro secreto en torno al cual gira la obra entera de Boris Vian y en el cual, entrelazados, se esconden el amor y la muerte.

The tragic love is described by the way and with numeral exactness, wheras things are described with poetic means. I agree with the rezension from 2008 here. I can add one detail and one aspect.

Vian treats every theme concerning jazz with thorough knowledge as he is personally involved, that is some kind of biografical.

In his time he was not involved in "fashionable" Resitance or existencialsm due to his real betraied love.

The main aspect is another. Vian was engineer, and I suppose that he knew the foundations of theoretical physics. That is the same as with Douglas Adams oder Robert Musil.

Velocity depending of the place and a bus ride ending in infinity, a desert, and a driver that keeps to the schedule with probality. That is why some metapherns seem to be absurd, but they are not, they are formed by scientific models.