In recent years, he's successfully moved into more mainstream, if indubitably classy, fare but David Cronenberg's latest project looks like a return to the peculiar world of The Fly or Crash. The Canadian filmmaker is planning a big-screen adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1997 novel As She Climbed Across the Table, the tale of a man who loses the love of his life to a shapeless void.

According to the Pajiba blog, Cronenberg is attached to direct, though there are as yet no casting details. Lethem's novel features two main characters: Philip, a man who is obsessed with a woman, and Alice (the woman), a physicist who is obsessed with a hole, or doorway to nothingness, which she has created in the laboratory where they both work. According to the website, the film is aiming for an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feel.

Lethem's other novels include The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle award.

Cronenberg himself is currently working on the drama A Dangerous Method, about the friendship and rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. He is also tipped to remake his own Oscar-winning horror movie The Fly, from 1986, as well as a sequel to Eastern Promises, his 2007 thriller about Russian gangsters in London. As if those were not enough, Cronenberg also has adaptations of Martin Amis's London Fields and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis in the works.