Alp

WELCOME TO SUNNY SWITZERLAND

The travel brochures were so colorful and glossy, the world had seemed so full of promise. How could Howard possibly have guessed, when he posed for his passport photos, that within two short weeks he would be lost in a blizzard, fall off an Alpine precipice and end up the prisoner of a cannibal dwarf?

ALP is a fairy tale, 1971. What Donald Barthelme did to Snow White, what Terry Southern did to Candide, William Hjortsberg does to Heidi and the picture postcards of the snowy Swiss Alps. Here are the jolly burghers, the happy farmers, Hansel and Gretel, little trolls, hearty mountaineers – but with what a difference! The Sound of Music was never this mocking laughter, these demonic chuckles, those sex-mad shrieks!