One book into the perfect movie...how about The Secret History?

If you could see one book turned into the perfect movie–one that would capture everything you love, the characters, the look, the feel, the story–what book would you choose? ~Booking Through Thursday

Donna Tartt's The Secret History has long been in my top ten list of favorite novels. From the opening paragraph:

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

the visualization of this novel remains as clear in my mind as the first day I read it 15 years ago. Can you picture this in the film?

Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of them rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

As far as I'm concerned, the mood that Donna Tartt was able to convey with her writing is beyond memorable. Beyond fantastic. Beyond  my imagination. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn't need to be made into a film at all. The images are already emblazoned on my mind. It's a college I've always wished I could have attended, the separate classroom with six Greek scholars and a cup of Mont Blanc pens at one's disposal...

It was with something of a shock that I saw it for the first time - a white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret's. On my first night there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano's voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can't remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night...

What a wonderful aura of an academic environment.

Except for the murder.