Alpine Apprentice

by Sarah Gorham

Overview

Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys—so, too, the languages she’s obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic.

Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes’s faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820350714
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Series:	Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

SARAH GORHAM is a poet, essayist, and president and editor in chief at Sarabande Books, an independent literary press publishing poetry, short fiction, and essays. She is the author of, most recently, Study in Perfect (Georgia), which won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Prospect, Kentucky.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/16/2017
Gorham revisits her rebellious teen years in a remote Swiss boarding school with a deft authorial hand, blending the internal reflections of a bildungsroman novelist, the technical writing of a mountain geologist, and the outsider observations of a travelogue writer. She traffics in well-worn psychological terrain: dreams, her quest for a suitable mother figure, and most prominently, the elusive longing, or Sehnsucht, that permeates the whole book. But her experience is as fresh as new snow in Switzerland, especially if one didn’t come of age there. Photos, drawings, and letters from her school days combine with innovative food-centered musings to create a multimedia touch. Half a century removed from her experiences at school, she is as unflinching with herself and those who helped shape her as she is in describing the foreboding, brutal beauty of the Alps. Even as she wrestles with ambivalence for a place that sends mixed messages about community and control, her affection for the nation and school that were her temporary home is obvious. Gorham takes great care not to rush her story, foreshadowing a transformative accident at the school with subtlety and persistence while going on repeated Wanderungen. Photos & diagrams. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

From the get-go, the wonderful Alpine Apprentice overlays the incantatory, disquieting logic of dream onto the concrete, the actual, the experientially wakeful. The effect is immediately hypnotic and profoundly affecting. It’s as if Gorham is chasing down her researched facts in order to desperately make the shards of her experience gel. And while the research, of course, does this, I adore this other level at which it operates—as testament to the narrator’s infectious desire to make sense of one’s life. This is no ordinary memoir, but memoir with its edges rubbed soft, like paper aching to return to the sort of tree-state it hardly remembers, but harbors like a fetish.

author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost - Matthew Gavin Frank

Reading Alpine Apprentice is like curling under an eiderdown blanket beside an open window with a mountain view. The air is brisk, the atmosphere breathtaking: sentences climb and descend, glide and pivot, move backward and forward at once to capture the formative influence of Switzerland on Gorham’s imagination. With wisdom and charm she explores language, displacement, educational philosophy, moral behavior, and the pleasures—and dangers—of seductive terrain.

author of Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain - Michele Morano

A new kind of landscape writing resonant with the rhythms of landscape painting, and of water as ice, as falls, as torrent, or avalanche, Alpine Apprentice is an unforgettable curation of a moment in time, a journey, an education, and its bordering dreams. In tones stunningly crisp, rapturous, and sure, Sarah Gorham has taken the book-length essay to a place of high art.

author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack - Mary Cappello

Interlaced with tidbits about the origin of certain words, food, and practices in Switzerland, as well as a history of the school itself, this is a (short?) collection of literary essays that coalesce into a life experience. Gorham mixes arresting prose and interesting interjections about her years of coming-of-age, which haunt and shape her still today.

Booklist

Alpine Apprentice is calm and lovely, a book of refuge and alpine heart.

Fourth Genre - Renée E. D’Aoust

Alpine Apprentice is beautifully written, professionally paced, well-managed in alternating sections of narrative and reflection, and enriched with factual materials, lines of investigation, and great visual memorabilia. It is alive, animated by curiosity more than self-centeredness, and the author's decision to broaden the thematic and associative range of materials is entirely well founded. It is a book of sensibility.

author of Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft - Tony Hoagland

Sarah Gorham has a poet’s eye for detail, a painterly eye for the tableau, an anthropologist’s sense of culture, an ecologist’s nose for the way all things connect, the way the foreign becomes familiar. She brings a beautiful but often harsh Switzerland to life character by character, meal by meal, verb declension by polysyllabic cuss. Plus sex and drugs—she was the kid the grownups all trusted, but she wasn’t always the good girl they thought. Alpine Apprentice is a book of life and love and understanding: funny, poignant, lyrical, sweet, and very smart.

author of Life Among Giants and The Remedy for Love - Bill Roorbach

Alpine Apprentice is calm and lovely, a book of refuge and alpine heart.

Fourth Genre - Renée E. D’Aoust

Interlaced with tidbits about the origin of certain words, food, and practices in Switzerland, as well as a history of the school itself, this is a (short?) collection of literary essays that coalesce into a life experience. Gorham mixes arresting prose and interesting interjections about her years of coming-of-age, which haunt and shape her still today.

Booklist

2016-12-14
How two years at a school in the Swiss Alps changed the life of a rebellious teenager.Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, essayist and Sarabande Books editor-in-chief Gorham (Study in Perfect, 2014, etc.) was bullied so mercilessly by her classmates that she thought about suicide. Hurt and angry, she vented her feelings on her four younger sisters, tormenting, teasing, and attacking them. Banished to an attic room, she howled in fury. When her frustrated parents, their patience worn thin, offered to send her to an international school in Switzerland, where she would get "an exotic secondary education," Gorham leapt at the chance. In her graceful, nostalgic memoir, she recalls traveling alone to the village of Goldern; acclimating to a school where students were awakened by a loud gong in the early hours of the morning to begin their chores; learning German (she picked up the language in 3 months, she reports proudly); and becoming a productive member of a close-knit community. The author discovered at the Ecole d'Humanité a "unique mixture of progressive education and tightly orchestrated environment." The school was founded by an idealistic couple, Paul Geheeb and his wife, Edith, based on "a single, essential thought: Become who you are." When faced with any choice, students were encouraged to ask themselves, "who do I want to be?" Although focused on self-reliance, the school nurtured a strong sense of community and responsibility to others. Adults were everywhere, monitoring students' academic progress and, equally important, their emotional and social growth. Besides portraits of teachers and fellow students, Gorham offers a frothy piece on meringues, a savory recollection of the "beefy, winey rush" of bindenfleisch, and a tense essay about an avalanche that took one student's life and incited "grief, fear, and anger" among the community. Returning to Goldern as an adult, Gorham broke down in tears, overcome with memories. A palpable, loving evocation of experiences "tucked deep" into the author's soul.

Kirkus Reviews