Charlie Kaufman's Debut Novel Is Brilliant

THERE ARE SOME people in the world who can't get enough of Charlie Kaufman. And who can blame them? The 61-year-old writer-director is perhaps the most profoundly inventive filmmaker in Hollywood since David Lynch. His films transport you to a parallel universe that is both baffling and beautiful. His ideas are fiendishly strange, yet somehow familiar and sometimes heartbreaking.

His breakthrough screenplay, Being John Malkovich (1999), tells an outlandish tale of a group of people who discover a portal into John Malkovich's mind. It presages the era of social media and 3-D video games, where your virtual lives feel more authentic than your real life. His next hit, Adaptation (2002), completely upends the idea of bookto-film adaptation by comically rewriting Susan Orlean's bestseller The Orchid Thief.

Then came the weird and wonderful Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004), which starts out bewilderingly, but turns into one of the most moving romances of all time, earning him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But his piece de resistance - as many fans would tell you - is Synecdoche, New York (2008), a crazy, sprawling masterpiece that attempts to confound you at every turn.