10 Unfilmable Books That Would Make Great Films

6. Austerlitz; WG Sebald

hauser Part-memoir, part-novel, part-something else entirely, Austerlitz is the most elegiac and unfilmable book of the 21st century. There€™s an over-riding academic kind-of-sadness to the novel which is so thin on plotlines (sub or arch) any film version would have to excuse itself as €˜testament to€™ and never €˜adaptation of€™. Why? Well Austerlitz only really concerns the chance meeting of the narrator and protagonist whilst they€™re studying the architecture of a railway waiting room. The narrative drive (which doesn€™t really exist) is carried by fleeting, subsequent meetings throughout Europe. But these meetings do not form the skeleton of a plot. Written without paragraphs, with some sentences a few pages long, illustrated with photos taken by Sebald himself, Austerlitz is almost an inner travelogue through time, memory and the pain of living in the aftermath of Nazi discord. There is less action in Austerlitz than almost any other book of such length. The book is so utterly non-visual too, with its constant meditations on history, architecture and chance encounters. Certain whimsical films have been made recently to great success, Linklater€™s Waking Life and Persepolis all handled philosophy pretty darned well, but what could be made of Austerlitz? So much more dense, more shallow and more quixotic than any of these, any audience connection would surely give way to cinematic confusion. Also, any film adaptation (and animation may be the way to go) would lose the reading experience altogether. So much of what makes Austerlitz so readable is the digressive style of the narrator, where his thoughts and feelings are interrupted by chance in his aimless odyssey through Europe€™s past. There is no chance Austerlitz will ever become a film.
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

David Hynes is a freelance writer, working in print, online, on stage and for screen. A film and book enthusiast, he has just finished his first novel.