Meeting the Devil by London Review of Books

Meeting the Devil Reviews

• 
  Marcus

  Wonderfully varied and always surprising autobiographical essays on a variety of topics by brilliant writers. An excellent read, with the possible exception of Edward Said's slightly self-indulgent account, and most of the (thankfully, brief) poetry. Ironically, I should now get back to trying to process the ever-increasing stack of LRB periodicals accumulating on my desk.
• 
  Lyn Elliott

  This is a collection I will come back to for years. dipping into different essays as different moods strike me.
  I got off to a slow start, repelled by Hilary Mantel's title essay 'Meeting the Devil', in which she reveals far more of her psychic dark humours and her physical sufferings from disease, surgery and suppuration than I ever wanted to know. I didn't finish her essay.
  The next was on James Bulger ( a 2year old murdered by two boys in England) , children's cruelty to other children, and disappeared children. Another long break in between reading essays.
  Then I hit Terry Castle's sharp piece on Susan Sontag and the book took off for me.
  Some of the essays are brilliantly funny, some poignant, some intellectually tough. I preferred the essays that maintained a distance between the writer and the reader - some were so intensely personal about death, dying, pain and madness that they were hard to read. But I had determined to read all the essays in order and I have.
  In future excursions into this wonderful volume I will go back to those that most intrigued me.
  Edward Said's 'Between Worlds'; Lorna Sage 'the Old Devil and his Wife'; Sheilah Fitzpatrick's 'A Spy in the Archives' and then nearly all the essays in the second half of the collection are ones I particularly enjoyed as I read them and I know that I will return to them and others over the years. Alan Bennett's essay on Miss Shepherd, 'The Lady in the Van' is haunting. Jenny Diski's final essay 'Scatter My Ashes' is very funny on the most unlikely of subjects - would she rather be cremated or buried when she dies, and where?
  I didn't recognise many of the authors' names, and have been delighted to have discovered them, so I will seek out other works by them too.
  All in all it was a perfect Christmas present.
• 
  Laurence

  Some good stories, but I stopped reading after a while because of too many other books (including keeping up with the LRB).