French writers` coronavirus getaways prompt backlash
(The Guardian France)

Accounts of bucolic isolation by Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq prompt charges of elitism and comparisons to Marie Antoinette Leïla Slimani and Marie Darrieussecq may be two of France´s most acclaimed writers - but their accounts of life in lockdown in their second homes in the countryside have unleashed an outpouring of resentment among French readers, with one fellow writer even comparing Slimani to Marie Antoinette.Slimani, who won the Prix Goncourt for her bestselling novel Lullaby, wrote in Le Monde of how she had left Paris and sequestered herself and her children in their countryside second home since 13 March, telling them that it was `a bit like Sleeping Beauty`. `Tonight, I couldn´t sleep,` she wrote. `Through my bedroom window, I watched dawn break over the hills. The icy grass, the lime trees on the branches of which the first buds appear.` Continue reading...