As of now, the season of high-profile film adaptations of high-profile novels is upon us. Last month, the movie version of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas hit theaters. And as of this week, you'll be able to catch the film version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. An awards-season take of Yann Martel's Life of Pi is just on the horizon, and who knows what we'll be looking at next year (or what I overlooked last time I checked Rottentomatoes.com)? So, in light of all this, I thought it would be interesting to see which of the authors of my site, and which of their books, have been treated to big-screen adaptations.
But maybe it would be better to ask which ones haven't. There have been film adaptations of claustrophobia-inducing works like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties. There have been film adaptations of sprawling novels like Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Nabokov's Lolita, and Proust's Time Regained. Even the writers' writer of writers' writers, Jorge Luis Borges, has seen a film adaptation or two.
Ah, but not every classic is meant for adaptation, or rote adaptation. Amazingly, there is a 2009 film version of the virtually plotless novel Invisible Cities. But instead of re-creating Italo Calvino's experimental text, the filmmakers took it simply as a point of departure. Another of the 20th century's great experimentalists, Franz Kafka, has fared differently. The 2011 adaptation of his best-known story, "The Metamorphosis", is part adaptation, part modern-day horror film updating. Faithful, but not all the way.
Is there any novel that you would love to see adapted to film? And should it be adapted or, you know, creatively tweaked? Let me know. Otherwise, happy reading, and happy moviegoing.