We’ve waited for what seems like One Hundred Years of Solitude for perhaps Colombia’s most-well regarded book to get a Netflix adaptation.
Finally, we have it. Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude has long been dubbed unfilmable, while simultaneously begging for a visual medium. He paints a multi-generational picture of the proliferate Buendía family living in the fictional upstart town of Macondo, nestled in the Colombian jungles. Family members die and multiply all while their town grows with innovation and crumbles with war. Márquez’s signature magical realism haunts and breathes mystery to the Buendía’s and their Macondo.
Don’t you just need to see those beautiful rolling green Andes? A mega cast à la Game of Thrones to depict the endless family members? And nifty special effects to capture the surreal? Don’t you just need to see Marquez’s words jump to resplendent life on screen?!
Of course, but we had to wait until prestige TV (and the Márquez estate to sell the rights). Only a long limited series (eight roughly one hour episodes and this is only the first half!) with high production value could do the story justice. Simply, the novel just spans too much time to cram into a movie, and we wouldn’t have it with a cheapo TV series of the days before HBO and Netflix.
The result has been well worth the wait. First and foremost, the series succeeds in building Macondo. The crux of the story is a family building a town, and all of the magic that comes in and out of it. The production, too, builds an intricately detailed town, pulling off a feat just as magical as that of the Buendía family. Just as thousands of people followed the family on their journey to Macondo, thousands of Colombians, many of them non actors, went to this new, remote town to build something beautiful. It’s authentic, with the full spirit of Colombia’s biggest literary pride and joy.
Since the book is so sacrosanct to national pride, the filmmakers couldn’t dare to butcher it. You have to admire how committed they are to giving all of Márquez’s words a moment on screen. Even parts of the book that would seem to translate poorly on film make it. And they pull it off. So so so much of the book is on screen, in airy, gory detail where you easily imagine a much shorter series or even a movie that guts a multitude of stories in the epic saga. But we deserve it all. And that’s what we get.
Now, we must wait longer. At over eight hours of viewing time, we are only half way there. Marquez’s tome requires 16 episodes. Just a little more waiting to see decades more the Buendias family and Macondo.
