Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes In South African Writing: An Anthology by Helen Moffett

Lovely Beyond Any Singing: Landscapes In South African Writing: An Anthology Reviews

• 
  Asli

  Landscape has always been an important part of literature, whether it’s to bring out the rue essence of a character like in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or to provide the plot with the specific landscape it requires to fully tell the story like the mystical Greek island in John Fowles’ Magus. But we can observe that when an author writers about his own land, his place of birth, land stops serving literature, literature becomes a tool to bring the land into life in the reader’s mind.
  
  In her anthology about landscapes in South African writing, Lovely Beyond Any Singing, Helen Moffett begins her book with these words which indicates just how influential landscape can be in a writer’s life:
  
  “I’ve been lucky to have lived in some of the most magnificent corners of South African ,if not the world. But it was on a farm in the south-western Cape, tucked into the lap of the mountains that march from Villersdrop to McGregor, that I experienced the two rites of passage that were to shape the way I would live my life: I learned to read; and to ride. The result is that I’ve been crazy about both literature and landscape for as long as I can remember.”
  
• 
  Megan

  A nicely done compendium of writing about South Africa's regions and landscapes.