Alix's Journal

by Alix Cléo Roubaud, Jan Steyn (Translator), Jacques Roubaud (Introduction)

"Alix's Journal" is a collection of private notebooks kept by Canadian photographer Alix Cleo Roubaud during the last four years of her life, before her death at the age of 31. Written, in a sense, for her husband--acclaimed novelist, poet, and mathematician Jacques Roubaud--"Alix's Journal" straddles the gap between French and English, poetry and prose, the tragic and the comic, the profound and the quotidian. Alix's idiosyncratic and revealing work gives us access to a singular consciousness, one that was profoundly influential on her husband's subsequent works, in style as well as content. The notebooks center on themes of love, marriage, photography, addiction, and death, and include examples of Alix's photographic work, whose strangeness and poignancy is enhanced by its juxtaposition with her plans for and interpretations of it.

Genres: Photography, Poetry

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alix's reading -- an incomplete list, both because I did not note everything, and because something she didn't give enough information for me to figure out what the book was.

Walter Benjamin Einbahnstrasse
Gershom Scholem
Le Bavard
Italo Calvino [at least, she went drinking with him; doesn't say if she read him]
The Fine Summer by Pavese El bello verano
L'age De L'eloquence: Rhetorique Et "Res Literaria" De La Renaissance Au Seuil De L'epoque Classique
Children of Clay
The Death of Virgil
Life: A User's Manual
Trout Fishing in America
Margaret Millar on a woman who dreams of her own death at a date already in the past
Laura Riding Jackson
Wittgenstein on photography
Ed McBain
Emma Lathen
Félix Fénéon
Under the Volcano
Letters of Virginia Woolf
Elizabeth Bishop poems (she translated some of them)
Something titled The Bachelors (Muriel Spark seems most likely, but no way to be sure)
The Wind in the Willows
Sextus Empiricus (she mentions memory and visual paradoxes -- probably Outlines of Pyrrhonism)
Yates, The Art of Memory
The Great Fire of London
At least one of the Martin Beck series
Action poétique
Archy and Mehitabel
Dino Buzzati
A Key to the Suite
Georges Simenon's Maigret books
Robert Rauschenberg
Lots and lots of crime novels (she mentions hardly any specifics, but states that for long periods she read them before bed every night)

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rereading of this book has turned out to be disappointing. This time around I do not feel Alix was such a brilliantly gifted writer and photographer. She certainly did have an extremely acute mind and a stunning body to go with it. It is not her writing but her story that interests me. She liked to photograph herself nude in a sparse room and then do magic in her darkroom. She often thought of killing herself. She was seriously asthmatic since childhood. She died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of thirty-one. Alix knew how to dress. More importantly, for me, she knew how to undress. She was very pretty in a French sort of way. She was from Canada, but born in Mexico. Bi-lingual and well-traveled at a young age. Left Canada in 1972 to study philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Provence primarily out of her chronic need for an excellent health care system and the fact that in France it was free. Alix drank alcohol heavily and I am not sure why. Demons perhaps. Restlessness maybe. She photographed what was disposable. Mainly herself.

[Alice Rovani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peut se substituer à La Chambre claire en matière du discours photographique parce qu'enserré dans le format journal les principes du temps, mort et œuvre prennent tout leur sens

[Featherbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alix's Journal has a certain addictive quality for me: I was captivated by her reading references to some seventy-odd writers and poets plus music and art, and took notes. Alix Cléo Roubaud was a Canadian living in Paris who kept sad daily journals which talk of insomnia, suicide, depression and her concerns about ailments, drinking, smoking, weight gain and clothes as well as her work as a photographer and her frustrated creativity. She died at the age of thirty-one from a pulmonary-embolism. Examples of journal entries will give an idea:

I read nothing but the TLS.
Every night I fear reading my journal; fear of finding nothing there; or the phrases of an entirely despicable person.me.
impossibility of writing, married to a poet.
The smell of big hotels and deckchairs, when people are having aperitifs: a mixed scent of amber, cigarette smoke, wax polish; and those meats cooking in wine.
Seurat did a good job with Grande Jatte.
48 hour visit from my parents.
I forget more and more.
Insomnia.
Beautiful weather.
In playing with God, one loses every round.
--fear of madness. of egocentricity; of everything.
--the moment arrives to put cream on my hands. I wish, intensely, that the scent of mimosa will not die off.
. was it worth all that psychoanalysis to see me melted like butter in the sun and to die of fear.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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