Paul Grimstad writes:

The newest member of the Oulipo, Daniel Levin Becker, born in Chicago in 1984, opens his Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature with a description of a beau présent read at the funeral of François Caradec (an Oulipian and biographer of Roussel) at Montparnasse cemetery in 2008. A beau présent, or ‘beautiful inlaw’, is a version of the lipogram in which only the letters of the addressee’s name – in this case f, r, a, n, c, o, i, s, d, e – are used (in the inverse constraint, the ‘beautiful outlaw’, the letters of the person’s name are missing). Becker, an adroit renderer of constrained French into English, gives a version of one of the recited lines: ‘François caresses readers’ crania in a deep rose derision, in a fine ironic farce free of disdain.’

(LRB 6 December 2012)

Harvard | Hardback 352 pp. |ISBN: 9780674065772