Ideally, good books should be left alone, even if they sit enshrined in a cobweb after a thousand years of solitude. In the reality of today's content industrial complex, that is unacceptable. Every good book can be and must be adapted. To watch is to live, to binge is to breathe. Literature is not a paradigm of text but fodder for algorithm. So here it is, with an air of inevitability, the much-touted, long-awaited, rigidly respectful and adequately decent Netflix series One Hundred Years Of Solitude -- the first eight parts, with the remaining eight coming next year.
Another familiar compound adjective to round off the description of this adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel is "handsomely-mounted". And "handsome" serves as a redeeming quality in the globally-averaged taste preferences of worldwide viewers -- its modern synonym could be "Netflixy". What we see here is a devoted relocation of Marquez's Macondo from page to screen, sometimes too crisp and precious, sometimes too bright and Like Water For Chocolate-y for a book full of forebodings, plagues, murders and curses.
And yet what directors Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Maura got right is that, in the territory of magical realism, it's the realism that matters. The series has a dutiful, physical directness and minimum reliance on CGI, and I became convinced at about halfway in when the narrative becomes darker, when the grim reality of war and revolution takes over from the mythical quirks and -- as millions of the book's fans everywhere expect -- the painstaking world-building of fabled, bloodied Macondo.
No longer just characters in our imagination, the people of Macondo are now corporeal entities -- their flaws and miseries, the existential engines of the novel, are now visible, clear-cut, illustrated. We see Jose Arcadio Buendia (Diego Vasquez) and Ursula Iguaran (Susana Morales and Marleyda Soto) in the flesh, first as a young couple who found Macondo on the edge of a swamp, then he as an old madman tied perennially to a chestnut tree haunted by nostalgia, and she as the town's matriarch and conscience as chaos erupts around her.
Of their three children, as in the book, the most prominent is Aureliano Buendia (played by four actors, the Colonel version being Claudio Catano), with Jose Arcadio (Edgar Vittorino) and Amaranta (Loren Sofia) completing the portrait of this odd family. In this first part, the story covers up to the third generation -- Arcadio, the motherless child who falls in love with his own mother, Pilar Ternera; and Aureliano Jose, the teenage boy who falls in love with his own aunt, Amaranta. Rebeca, the earth-eating girl who arrives one night with a bag full of bones, is all curves and pouting lips -- she's sexier than I last remember. Remedios Moscote, the tragic teen bride, shows us how pure beauty can never survive in a place like Macondo.
Marleyda Soto and Diego Vásquez in One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
At the end of Episode 8, we have a glimpse of the fourth generation: Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo and Jose Aureliano Segundo. If all this is confusing, it's supposed to be. At least in the book, you have the family tree at the front to consult, so I suggest you keep a copy nearby as you watch (I did, and it helped).
There are moments when One Hundred Years Of Solitude looks like an expensive telenovela. Filmed entirely in a mock-up town constructed in Colombia, the series both benefits and is undermined by that condition.
Marquez's story is rooted in the tradition of Latin American folk tales and myths -- supernatural, steamy, violent, melodramatic, "told in the way my grandmother once told me", as the writer said many times -- but a prestigious TV adaptation aiming to please 100 million viewers in 2024 can only replicate the broadest parameters of these complex, primordial qualities, its inability to render nuance, texture, colour, sadness, filth and grime, is a given. We admire what we see and we're sufficiently amused; but we won't cry over the death of Remedios or feel the shudder in our hearts when Colonel Aureliano faces the firing squad. Sometimes the magic is not in seeing, but when we're deprived of the ability to see.
The core gravity of the novel, its narrative genius, is in the way fate feels indistinguishable from history. Not the way we see in most Hollywood historical dramas; it's more primitive, more unrefined, more messy, as if the world had just started and we were still more accustomed to violence and death, and we had to accept them as our destiny and our story.
The book One Hundred Years Of Solitude tells a story of curses: insomnia, amnesia, incest, nightmare, fascism, capitalism, disillusionment. The curses of unrequited love and forbidden passion; the curse of the futility of all undertakings, of being stuck in an interminable cycle -- genetic, sentimental, historical. The curse, in short, of being alive.
With the best intentions of the filmmakers, with all the money to ensure that Macondo looks most handsome, and with the spirit of Marquez (or his family) hovering above, One Hundred Years Of Solitude the series is at its best in brief moments when it understands this. Elsewhere, it keeps us watching, curious, doubt-prone, and entertained.
- One Hundred Years Of Solitude
- Starring Viña Machado, Jesus Reyes, Claudio Cataño
- Directed by Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Maura
- Now streaming on Netflix
