Netflix’s new adaptation of this beloved book is pretty much perfect

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel, weaves superstition, sex and the surreal into an unparallelled Spanish-language epic. Helen Coffey assesses whether a new Netflix show can possibly do justice to the original

Four episodes into Netflix’s new adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m still reeling. Partly at the hugely ambitious, lavishly filmed series itself – but mainly at the fact that it ever got made in the first place.

A sprawling masterclass in magic realism, the 1967 novel spans seven generations of the fictional Buendía family, weaving together sex, superstition, and the downright surreal. It’s a complex series of warped, bizarre and at times grotesque tales, propelled by deep-rooted, unshakeable desires and the doomed characters’ inability to escape their fate – a kind of intergenerational curse that passes from parents to children (including, more often than not, the proclivity to copulate with their own relatives).

Set in the make-believe Colombian town of Macondo from the early 1800s onwards, the book charts how a streak of endless civil wars, freak climate events and imperialist plantation owners shape this geographically nebulous corner of Latin America for over a century. Márquez paints this world with such vivid, visceral strokes that, years after reading his novel, it stayed seared into my imagination: Rebeca shovelling handfuls of dirt into her mouth; mad José Arcadio tied to a chestnut tree and muttering in Latin; a naked Remedios the Beauty painting animals on the walls with her own excrement.

It’s utterly bewitching, but not what you’d call an “easy” read: a non-linear 400+ pager in which the story jumps around through time and half the characters have some variation of the same name. The multi-generational clan is so hard to keep straight, in fact, that there’s famously a family tree printed at the front of the book.

In a world, then, where algorithms, not humans, rule the roost when it comes to commissioning decisions, it seems almost inconceivable that this challenging masterpiece would get green-lit. This is a streaming ecosystem in which relentless seasons of Emily in ... [insert European city here] are churned out without pause or remorse. In which the same rehashing of “career woman from big city returns to small town and falls in love with simpler life/grumpy but warm-hearted local” is turned into a staggering number of films per year. In which safety trumps risk when it comes to reward.

One Hundred Years of Solitude isn’t just a world away from all that: it resides in a different universe entirely. Márquez himself basically declared it unfilmable while he was alive, granting the rights to Harvey Weinstein on the condition that he “film the entire book, but only release one chapter – two minutes long – each year, for 100 years”. I would have bet good money on Netflix not touching it with a bichero (barge pole), never mind picking up a big-budget, 16-episode, Spanish-language epic.

And yet, here we are. It feels nothing short of miraculous. As does the fact that the creators have achieved the seemingly impossible: remaining faithful to the source material while artfully translating it into a piece of visually gorgeous storytelling.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a perfectly crafted literary adaptation. From spot-on casting to the sparse yet carefully chosen dialogue; from camera shots that move with purpose to follow the characters and immerse the viewer to music that summons forth a world steeped in magic and mysticism – there’s an ethereal, fairytale-like quality that grabs your attention by the throat and won’t let go.

José Arcadio Buendía sets forth to set up the town of Macondo (Mauro Gonzalez/Netflix)

The first episode starts at the end of the story – we see the Buendía house ravaged by time; the ominous, blood-stained shape of a corpse under a sheet; armies of ants colonising every surface – before we’re plunged into the past. The opening line exactly mirrors that of the book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This is a major factor in explaining why the tangled tapestry of stories genuinely works on screen – much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the original, Márquez’s evocative, sumptuous language placed in the mouth of a narrator to guide us through the strange and sweeping narrative. This exterior, omnipotent voice is crucial in explaining what the characters themselves would struggle to show not tell, and vital in establishing a tone that keeps us at one remove from naturalism.

It’s the same tactic employed by the 1981 ITV dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited, often held up as the gold standard for literary adaptations; in that, too, the beauty of the original text was treated with a quiet reverence, quoted directly by Jeremy Irons’s narrator as he describes Oxford as “a city of aquatint” that “exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth”.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, we first journey with José Arcadio Buendía, patriarch of the Buendía dynasty, and his new wife Ursula Iguaran (who just so happens to be his cousin) as they embark upon married life. A battle between superstition and science commences right off the bat: Ursula is initially too frightened to consummate the marriage after being warned by her mother that she will be cursed with deformed children with pig’s tails as punishment for incest.

This is how you portray magic realism on screen – by embracing it and welcoming it in

The fantastical elements of the story aren’t shied away from, and yet somehow never feel bombastic or overblown: doors slam by themselves to show marital discord; when the couple imagine living by the sea, waves wash across the parched, chapped earth in front of them and lap at their feet. Ghosts are presented physically, with a man José Arcadio killed hanging around the house with a hangdog expression and clutching his bleeding neck at every turn, and mystery child Rebeca turning up at the door with a bag of her dead parents’ bones that rattle and shake irritably. This is how you portray magic realism on screen – by embracing it and welcoming it in, without exaggerating or pushing too far into absurdity.

Though they never reach open water, José Arcadio and Ursula set out to escape their demons, and finally set up the town of Macondo after José Arcadio envisions it in a dream. Later, we see their family expand and become embroiled in their own misguided passions, predetermined to make the same mistakes as their forebears over and over, ad infinitum.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía is plunged back into his memories as he faces the firing squad (Pablo Arellano/Netflix)

It’s a brave person who takes on a book this renowned, this idolised and this elaborate, and the production of the series hasn’t been completely without controversy. Some locals of Aracataca, the birthplace of Márquez, weren’t impressed by the decision to film in the industrial city of Ibagué, 430 miles to the south, instead of in the author’s hometown. Based at the foot of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, Aracataca is where the Nobel Prize winner lived until the age of eight with his maternal grandparents. Though he went on to live and work in Paris, New York, Mexico City, Caracas and Barcelona, he credited the town of his youth with providing the inspiration for much of his writing, not least One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“We’re disappointed that Netflix decided not to film here, but we all know that anyone inspired by the series will have to come to Aracataca, as the heart of Macondo lies here,” Robinson Mulford, a local high-school teacher, told The Guardian. “They will feel the kindness, the solidarity of the people, and everything else that Gabriel García Márquez said of the Colombian Caribbean. They will all be received with love.”

One can only hope this beautifully made series will be received with love, too, despite the perceived snub. “No matter where you go, you will never escape your fate,” Ursula’s mother warns her daughter in the opening episode. One Hundred Years of Solitude could just be fated to become that rarest of things: a timeless literary adaptation as beloved as the book that inspired it.