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.