Book description
Mysterious and evocative, tantalising and erotic, this unique novel
explores the qualities of love and obsession. Marienbad, the central
European spa resort, is immortalised in the romantic imagination for its
legendary doomed love affairs - Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzow, Chopin
and Marie Wodzinska, Edward VII and Mizzi Pistl, Franz Kafka and Felice
Bauer. In a Marienbad winter, within its ambience of history and
allusion, theatre and illusion, a modern pair of lovers look for the
cure that eluded all their famous precursors. Echoing the déjà vu of
Alain Resnais' classic movie Last Year at Marienbad, they track the
pristine forest snows in pursuit of answers to questions that all lovers
have sought throughout history. 'White Shadows is enormously satisfying;
a beautiful mood piece perfectly evoking the aimless existence of those
who seek but never seem to be satisfied, in a town with ever-present
reminders that death and decay lie in wait for the seekers.' - Otago
Daily Times Philip Temple was born in Yorkshire and educated in
London. He emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 18, becoming an
explorer, mountaineer and outdoor educator. With Heinrich Harrer, of
Seven Years in Tibet fame, he made the first ascent of the Carstensz
Pyramide in West Papua, one of the seven summits of the seven
continents, and later sailed to sub-Antarctic Heard Island with the
legendary H. W.  Bill Tilman to make the first ascent of Big Ben.
Philip Temple s first books reflected this adventurous career and The
World At Their Feet won a Wattie Award in 1970. After a period as
features editor for the New Zealand Listener, Philip became a full time
professional author in 1972. Since that time he has published about 40
books of all kinds and countless articles and reviews. In the fiction
field, his eight novels include the best-selling Beak of the Moon, an
anthropomorphic exploration of the mountain world seen through the eyes
of the mountain parrot, kea. This, and its successor Dark of the Moon,
are rated as unique in New Zealand literature. In more recent times, his
Berlin-based novels To Each His Own and I Am Always With You
controversially tackle issues around German guilt and historical
experience. Philip s non-fiction range is wide, from books about
exploration and the outdoors to New Zealand history and electoral reform
(MMP). His book about the Wakefield family and the early British
settlement of New Zealand, A Sort of Conscience, was NZ Biography of the
Year in 2003, and won the Ernest Scott History Prize from the University
of Melbourne. Philip s award-winning children s books, in
collaboration with wildlife artist Chris Gaskin, are unique to the
genre. Over the years, Philip has been awarded several fellowships,
including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the Robert
Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 NZ National Library Fellowship, a
Berliner Künstlerprogramm stipendium in 1987 and the 2003 Creative New
Zealand Berlin Writers Residency. In 2005, he was invested as an Officer
of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature and
given a Prime Minister s Award for Literary Achievement. Following
examination of his work, Philip was granted the higher degree of Doctor
of Literature (LittD) by the University of Otago in 2007. Philip Temple
lives in Dunedin with his wife, poet and novelist, Diane Brown.
