Finding a writer and book previously unknown offers a rare, pleasing serendipity. Among Steve Mitchelmore’s favourite books of 2021 were Gabriel Josipovici’s 100 Days and Ellis Sharp’s Twenty-Twenty.
Sharp’s book moves within that mode of life-writing often labelled autofiction, though the term itself remains unsatisfactory. Twenty-Twenty acknowledges the impossible sincerity of autobiography even as it invokes and unsettles the genre’s fictional nature. Like Josipovici’s work, it uses the constraint of daily entries across a year, struggling against and yet renewing the compulsion to write. Sharp’s account rails against the treatment of Palestinians, Zionism, and the way in which the Labour Party responded to largely unproven accusations of anti-Semitism. Framing his polemic is an elusive listing: books read, films and television programmes watched, meals eaten, and daily appearances of his daughter. Twenty-Twenty is as quietly mesmerising as Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, another work concerned with how language can be coerced to give adequate expression to lived experience.
Ellis Sharp’s essays in Sharply Critical continue this movement of thought: interrogating the relation between writing and the world it seeks, always imperfectly, to render. Caroline Alexander’s translation of The Iliad remains set aside, supplanted for now by other voices. George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics offers a different kind of interiority: dense, methodical, the slow construction of a philosophy that shapes ways of seeing and being.