Alpine Apprentice

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction

by Sarah Gorham

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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2017

Reviews

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's such a bizarre but rich experience to read a memoir in which you know so many of the characters in real life. I was a student at the Ecole for one year before the avalanche, but my story goes back further, to when my parents met there as teachers in the 1980s. My father's book is cited in the first few pages, my teachers' classrooms are shared with the author's, and so much of this read like the dreams Gorham describes of the school: constantly returning, haunting and yet ultimately such an integral part of your life that you can't imagine who you would be without it. I was especially spellbound by how she used science and history to pull different threads of the story together, and the book truly helped me understand my experiences in a new light. I'd be curious to know what others think of a book that is so rooted to reality for me-- I expect they will find Gorham's poetic homage to her alpine refuge to be surprising and full of magic.

[Matthew Gavin Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sam Lange · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reads like a piece of poetry, full of wanderlust with just a hint of teenage angst. Have a German dictionary on hand, as the author does not translate her use of common phrases and delightful words (which I appreciate as a deliberate attempt to have her readers be as much a foreigner to a story as she was to the land and language). The story wraps up with a heart wrenching memory, and leaves readers fulfilled with the Swiss journey they were led on.

[Caro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I lived in German-speaking Switzerland at about the same time, though I was with a family for a year, while Sarah was in boarding school for two years. Her encounters with language, culture, food, and landscape were true to my own, though she had a lot more freedom than I did. Loved the memoir, less enthusiastic about the psychologizing.

[Grazyna Nawrocka · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was different than I expected, but it was not a disappointment. There was significant component related to mountaineering. I enjoyed factual information as well as narrative about personal experiences. It's an interesting and well-written work.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book-length collection of essays. Chronicling her two years spent at an international school in Switzerland, Gorham has a poet's gift of language and expertly captures the landscape, young adulthood, and growing up in another culture. Looking forward to reading more of her work!

[Renée · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Alpine Apprentice: A Memoir," Sarah Gorham focuses on her formative time at a Swiss boarding school in the Bernese Oberland. Gorham explores, through nineteen beautifully written and often-short pieces, how the teachers at Ecole d’Humanité and the country of Switzerland not only saved her from bullies at her American high school and her own teenage rebellions but also formed sensibilities that have lasted a lifetime.

There is not one misstep in her descriptions and analysis of Switzerland; Gorham gets everything about the country right. As a Swiss resident, I find her powers of observation astonishing. She accomplishes the incredible feat of articulating the essence, nuance, and language of a place that is not her country of origin. One of the great pleasures of "Alpine Apprentice" is that even as Gorham looks back with some nostalgia, she doesn’t romanticize herself or the country.

[Lasdelanogmail.Com · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir. It reads like a great novel with a perfect dash of a travelogue rolled in and kept me turning the pages past my bedtime. Such a great portrait of teenage angst, energy, and yearnings all happening in the beautiful alps at an extraordinary school.

[penelopewanders]

It is a strange experience indeed to read someone's recollections on their past, when you yourself were a part of that past. I had to chide myself not to mind the discrepancies, as Sarah Gorham says herself, that part of this is part dream as well, and dreams are not easily steered or led. I am very keen to read what others, who are not familiar with the school and the actual events recounted will have to say about this. It was humbling how easily, while reading, I became a self-conscious and perhaps at times slightly envious teenager, reliving petty jealousies and also joys. This was very kindly sent to me by the author, and the prose is often glorious. Nostalgia, also discussed here, does have a sad edge to it, and so I am left with a certain wistfulness for youth gone by, and memories which like clouds, shift and change their shape from moment to moment - or perhaps from one person remembering to the next.
Now I am curious to read other books by Sarah.