‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Finally Gets a Screen Adaptation

Wisely, the expansive Netflix series that just debuted the first eight (of an eventual 16) hour-long episodes deploys the use of a narrator, ensuring that these peculiar, unpredictable words are the first spoken in the show. Watching this, however, was the first time I heard them in Spanish, reminding me that despite my enthusiasm for García Márquez’s work, I’d never actually read it as it was meant to be read.

And surely there will be many whose only encounter with One Hundred Years of Solitude will be the television version, despite the 50 million copies sold. (Someone buying a book doesn’t mean they read it; my copy sat on a shelf for more than a quarter of the title’s time.) Those who encounter the story of the seven generations of the Buedía family living in the fictional village of Macondo as television will experience an even more radical translation than written language. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a remarkable production.

García Márquez, nicknamed Gabo in his native Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, was pretty adamant that a movie could never be made from the work. He told Harvey Weinstein that he would give Weinstein the rights on the condition that the producer “film the entire book but only release one chapter—two minutes long—each year, for 100 years.” This quote, like George Harrison saying “there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead,” might seem like final words, but don’t count out new technologies (like the deep-pocketed Netflix, and whatever is responsible for zombie Beatles songs like “Now and Then”), as well as the malleability of an artist’s estate. One Hundred Years of Solitude, the series, has been produced in concert with Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, sons of the author, who maintain rights to their father’s work following his death in 2014 and the death of their mother, Mercedes Barcha, in 2020.

Gabriel García Márquez poses for a portrait in Cartagena, Colombia, on Feb. 20, 1991. Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Still, there are some Colombians who are pre-boycotting the work on principle. Such extreme fealty is understandable. A possibly true factoid you can read on the internet is that only the Bible has sold more copies in Spanish than the works of García Márquez. Another one, even hazier but just as striking, is that the influential book’s depiction of the Banana Massacre of 1928 was what forced United Fruit to rebrand and change its name to Chiquita.

Then there’s the specificity of form. One Hundred Years is a massive, meaty text with frequent swerves into fantasy, prurience, and violence, and makes quick jumps between flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there’s the biggest roadblock for many readers, its intentionally perplexing family tree with a great many of the characters sharing the same name. Surely this confusion means something, you reassure yourself, unsure for the moment which José Arcadio has the spotlight in the middle of another fabulous tale. Indeed, the idea of behavior recurring over long periods of time is central. But filmed, as you are actually seeing it (and seeing faces), a lot of this magic gets lost in the translation—a complaint which goes beyond the expected “hey, that’s not how I visualized Pilar the fortune teller’s house!” gripes.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has a narrative far too stuffed to summarize, but I can try. Married cousins José Arcadio and Úrsula decide to leave their village after José Arcadio kills another man while defending Úrsula’s honor. (She has been denying her husband sex, wearing chastity belts despite their raging desires out of fear that any offspring will have pig-like tails.) The dead man then starts hanging out in their home. A ghost story, I suppose, but García Márquez’s approaches the haunting—and every other fantastical element of the story—in a curious and direct manner. The dead man just appears in the house, hanging around, getting blood everywhere, more of a nuisance than a terror.

José Arcadio has visions of a utopian city so he, Úrsula, and others join him on a long journey and eventually put down roots. Their village, Macondo, is totally isolated (indeed, for many of the early chapters you have no clue what year it is), lending each development the heft of importance. “Clearly,” you think, “every character and utterance is meant to be symbolic of mankind’s evolution, as Macondo is nothing if not all of humanity under a microscope.” And surely you can read it that way, or look for analogies in Colombian political history, but to do that too much undercuts the fun of riding along on García Márquez’s roller coaster.

And this is precisely why some things work better in a book than in a movie or television adaptation. In prose, the bizarre elements—visions, levitation, impossibly long periods of rain, a character who chews on the walls—take on a humorous and discordant tone when simply stated as everyday fact. When you see it, at least for me, it cheapens it. The best example I can give you is when the town’s founding father, driven to madness after years as an only partially successful alchemist, decides to tie himself to an enormous (and rather symbolic) tree. Heavy oak metaphors have considerably less panache when you are watching them on your screen.

The other big change is that, other than the foreshadowing in the famous first line, the series is told chronologically. This is an understandable decision, but it undercuts some of the magic of Macondo, where any stray moment can initiate a relevant jump on the timeline. Still, the production design of the town—a shabby collection of huts that grows into turn-of-the-century elegance—is remarkable, and reportedly one the largest productions in Latin American history. (Three separate towns were created, to represent Macondo’s evolution.)

The eight episodes have been split between two directors. Alex Garcia Lopez is a United States-based director of Argentine origin, and an alumnus of hit shows like The Witcher, The Punisher and the recent Star Wars series The Acolyte. Laura Mora Ortega is a Colombian director with a less international resume, but whose work includes the Netflix series Green Frontier. Neither are afraid of One Hundred Years’s more lusty moments (you can set your watch to the regular hammock-based interludes) and when civil war eventually barges into Macondo, there are some heart-pounding battle sequences that don’t hold back on the gore.

Loren Sofía as Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude.Pablo Arellano/ Netflix

Some of the more famous moments from the first half of the novel (or, I should say, first half of the narrative, since the show mostly goes in order) stitch together quite nicely in a visual form. There is a stretch in which a plague of insomnia hits the town, which at first is welcomed. More time to get things accomplished, José Arcadio says. But with a lack of sleep comes confusion, until no one can remember what anything represents, forcing them to leave notes everywhere. (“Don’t Pee In The Streets, People Get Angry” is probably my favorite, because it’s funny but also true.) Eventually, the memory of the townsfolk gets so blitzed that no one can even read anymore, plunging everyone into paranoia and violence. This whole chapter cuts together marvelously in the show.

Another moment—among the most emotionally resonant images from the story—is when one character is violently killed, and their blood spills out of their house, down the street, weaving around corners, into another house, and across several rooms until the streak ends at the foot of the deceased’s mother. This is a moment that is not diminished when filmed.

However, there are some aspects of García Márquez’s story that are wisely tamped down. A major character (an adult) experiences love at first sight with a 9-year-old girl. His obsession becomes “a physical sensation that almost bothered him when he walked, like a pebble in his shoe,” and he is described in the novel as having fits of asthma just hearing her voice, especially when she calls him “sir.” Egads! He decides he must marry her, and a deal is worked out between the families. She can marry once she’s reached puberty, which occurs for her “before getting over the habits of childhood.” Yikes all around. All I can say is that in the book—in which there are soothsayers and ghosts and the pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, not to mention enormous blocks of eloquent prose—these deviations don’t read quite so repulsive as I’ve laid them out here.

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To its credit, the show doesn’t erase this section entirely, but it is lessened. When we first meet the character Remedios, she is presented as “very young,” but she doesn’t look 9. I don’t know the age of the actress playing her, but when she later gets her first period (which we witness both as metaphor and reality), a few costume changes age her up considerably. It’s still questionable, but certainly skirts around the ick factor. The same goes for a moment of inadvertent near-incest. (A less inadvertent one awaits in season two, but I don’t know how that will play out just yet.)

This loyalty to the text might be why Netflix’s promotional machine has been pretty minimal in the United States. Other than an article this summer in Vanity Fair, most of the press has been geared to the Hispanic market. (There were lines around the block to see the first episodes in Havana, but nothing happened in New York City.) Considering that Netflix’s biggest hit is the South Korean series Squid Game, the fact that One Hundred Years is in Spanish can’t be used as an excuse to keep this exclusively international. There is, however, a lot of content out there, so I’m wondering how much of an impact it will make with U.S. viewers.

Will I watch season two? Absolutely, and not just because of the time I’ve already invested. On its own merits, the show is engaging, the performances (particularly Claudio Cataño as Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the mononymous Akima as the feral cousin Rebeca) are quite good. Everything (and everyone) is gorgeous, so the show is a winner from a visual perspective alone. But it may not be a bad idea to take advantage of the intermezzo between seasons and take the book off the shelf before the launch of part two. The series is, after all, only a rough translation.