1. Catcher In The Rye – JD Salinger
It is unlikely that any actor alive today will get to portray Salinger’s disaffected teen anti-hero Holden Caulfield. While alive Salinger refused every offer to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie. Since his death his estate insists nothing has changed in terms of licensing movie, television, or stage rights of his works.
2. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Apart from a poorly received1951 effort by Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa, cinema has been reluctant to adapt this Dostoevsky classic - although the author’s infinitely more convoluted (and weightier) novel Crime and Punishment has been adapted several times.
3. Ubik – Philip K Dick
When you consider that more than several of Phil K Dick’s short stories have been adapted into highly successful sci-fi movies (Total Recall and Blade Runner among them), it seems remiss of Hollywood to have neglected his 1969 novel, Ubik, arguably his finest work. Director Michel Gondry is rumoured to be working on a film adaptation to be released in early 2013.
4. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The late Foster Wallace’s dystopian vision of the US in the near future, despite appearing on every ‘Greatest Books of the 21st Century’ list that has ever been compiled, will probably never be filmed due to its meandering narrative and epic length. Any screenwriter taking on the task will have some monumental editing to do.
5. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Huxley’s nightmare vision of a future where euthanasia is compulsory, drug use is encouraged and humans are conceived in a biology lab, has somehow yet find its way to our cinemas. Aliens director Ridley Scott, however, is rumoured to be interested in changing that.
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Despite its huge impact on the literary world, there have been no movies produced about Marquez’s classic of magic realism. The Colombian author has never agreed to sell the rights to the novel, even though Hollywood’s finest film-makers must be clamouring to get their hands on it.
7. Underworld – Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo’s postmodern masterpiece is a whopping slab of a novel and a gripping read. But it would need serious character culling before finding its way to the big screen. Perhaps this is why it remains unfilmed.
8. The Stranger – Albert Camus
With its slight plot and philosophical themes, Camus’ absurdist novella, despite being on the syllabus of many a literature course and regarded as one of the greatest French novels of all time, is unlikely to ever get the film treatment.
9. Maus – Art Spiegelman
Probably the finest graphic novel not to have been pounced on by the film-world, Maus, the story of the author’s father’s life as a Polish Jew living under the Nazis, is the only comic book ever to have won a Pulitzer Prize. Someone put us out of our misery, please!
10. Paddy Clarke Hahaha - Roddy Doyle
Comprising a series of vignettes that don’t follow any kind of chronological order, Roddy Doyle’s rites of passage novel set in 1960s Ireland would be a tricky one to adapt, not least because finding someone talented enough to play the story’s highly charismatic 10-year-old narrator would be a tough task.
