Alix's Journal

Alix's Journal by Alix Cléo Roubaud
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

View all my reviews