Serious-minded Valentines and literary romance enthusiasts can do worse than gifting this elegantly produced collection of the letters written during the two years of the whirlwind romance described by some as the Romeo and Juliet of Afrikaans literature. Brink met the fiery, moody and erratic Jonker in 1963 when he was 28 and she 30. He had recently returned from two years in Paris and had published what the editor of this collection, Francis Galloway, describes as "his first genuinely innovative novel, Lobola vir die Lewe". Jonker had published a collection of poetry, was living as a single mother and working as a proofreader in Cape Town.In his 2009 memoir A Fork in the Road Brink described their meeting as an event that turned his "ordered existence upside down". They were never quite the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes item that many would like to imagine but the letters serve as more than mere titillation for literary scholars. There's poetry and universality and heartbreak here and while knowing something about the authors helps, it's not a prerequisite for appreciating their emotive outpourings.Brink made the letters available to his publishers shortly before his death last year. While he had destroyed the originals decades before, he had presciently written them on carbon paper and so the entire correspondence of 200 or so letters survived.The decision to have one translator (Karen Schimke) for Jonker's letters and one for Brink's (Leon de Kock) results in two distinctive voices and helps to create a strong sense of the character of each of the authors. Galloway's introduction gives readers some context but also points to some of the anomalies that reading this epistolary non-fiction novel throws up.Sometimes incidents alluded to are not described but only hinted at - nights of "the glorious fire of ecstasy" - and at others, time has passed between the exchanges and the reader only gets hints of what might have occurred in between. At one point Brink laments the distance between them - he was teaching in Grahamstown - and "this accursed pen-and-paper business. I want to be with you. Talk. And then stop talking and be with you."What gradually emerges is more than just an exchange between lovers who were part of the anti-establishment Afrikaans literary scene during a particularly intense period of South African history. It's also a universal story of the ebbs and flows and passions of a romance written with lucidity and poetry. The struggles of the lovers are not all political or creative but also include the mundane experiences of their everyday lives - particularly Jonker's as a struggling single mother. The inevitable tragedy of her death provides a poignant ending against which all that precedes it can be read in the light of the search for clues that a suicide often elicits in the lives of those left behind.As Brink wrote in his final letter shortly before Jonker walked into the ocean at Three Anchor Bay - "You're irreplaceable in my heart. I always carry the burden of your happiness." Even if she had lived, theirs would have been a doomed but fiery and significant relationship and this book, a labour of love in itself, is a fitting testament to its subjects and the often elusive but undeniable ties that bind.'Flame in the Snow' - The Love Letters of André Brink and Ingrid Jonker edited by Francis Galloway, translated by Leon de Kock and Karin Schimke published by Umuzi, R350...