The Zwicks are upside down

The Zwicks are upside down (original title: The Twits ) is a book by Roald Dahl from 1980, in which bizarre ideas, peculiar twists in the story and detailed descriptions of the disgusting of its protagonists go to the brink of good taste. Quentin Blake created the illustrations . The German-language transmission comes from Charles Schüddekopf and was first published in 1981 by Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg .

action

The names of the two main actors, Mr. and Mrs. Twit, cannot be translated into German, in English a “Twit” means something like a dork or a dumbass. True to their name, the couple behaves: both are old, ugly and neglected (especially Mr Twits beard and the slimy leftovers it contains from years of neglecting laundry are described in detail in the first chapters) and spend most of their time with each other to annoy each other. Sometimes she throws her glass eye in his beer, sometimes he puts a frog in her bed, she takes revenge with earthworms in his spaghetti and he secretly extends her walking stick to trick her into believing that she has "the shrinkage disease" and then stretching her with balloons and to finally soar to heaven.

The core of the plot, however, is the attempt by the Twits, who used to train apes in a zoo , to train a family of apes to stand on their heads for as long as possible. Scheff-Scheff, the monkey father, seeks revenge: when the Twits go into town one day, he breaks out of his cage and into the Twits' house in order to glue the entire living room furniture to the ceiling with the help of numerous birds. The returned Twits think that they are now themselves upside down. When trying to turn the "right" way around, they stick to the glue secretly applied by the animals and - in the end, actually shrink to nothing, because they can no longer free themselves.

Book editions

• Roald Dahl : The Zwicks are upside down . Rowohlt Tb., 7th edition, February 1997, ISBN 3-499-20609-9