Alix's Journal

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.

From Alix’s Journal:

You left yesterday morning, and last night I got drunk by nine. I didn’t walk straight on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where I went to post my first letter. At ten o’clock I collapsed dead drunk. I woke at three and read what Nigel Nicholson wrote his parents, and read Jacques Roubaud in Change (a poem about water similar to Hockney’s distortions). I asked myself why I abuse myself in this manner when I am loved and really must keep alive; why do I get drunk on an empty stomach? why do I drug myself with sleeping pills? why do I smoke?

looking after oneself.

I had things to do today.

To fall asleep like everyone else, etc., to lead a simple regular life. To fall asleep like
everyone else, that is what I want.

Moving, fragile, and intimate, Alix’s Journal is a unique testament to a great artist, lost before her time.

Publishers Weekly

Alix Cleo Roubaud was a photographer on the cusp of a great career before a pulmonary embolism caused her death at 31. She had battled with depression, addiction, and suicidal tendencies all her life and had carefully chronicled her thoughts on these and other subjects from the age of 18 on. The carefully translated text of the last four years of Roubaud's life is presented here as a chronicle of a woman struggling with depression and complex feelings about art and God. While Roubaud may be recognized within the art world, she is largely unknown to the average reader. Unfortunately, disjointed and sometimes incoherent diary entries may not be the best introduction for anyone not already familiar with her work; large sections of the journal read like the diary entries of an adolescent girl trying on the styles of better writers (Nabokov immediately comes to mind). Had Roubaud lived, she may well have developed a more unique voice. (June)

Alix Cleo Roubaud was born in 1952. She studied architecture and psychology in Ottawa, and philosophy in Paris, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein. She considered herself “essentially” a photographer; her work has been featured in an acclaimed short film by Jean Eustache, as well as in several works by her husband, Jacques Roubaud. She died in 1983 of a pulmonary embolism.

Jan Steyn is a South African translator from French and Afrikaans to English. He lives in Paris where he does work in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris.

Jan Steyn is a South African translator from French and Afrikaans to English. He lives in Paris where he does work in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris.

Jacques Roubaud, born in 1932, has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre. He is one of the most accomplished members of the Oulipo, the workshop for experimental literature founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais. He is the author of numerous books of prose, theatre and poetry.