Netflix’s new adaptation of this beloved book is nearly perfect

FOur episodes in Netflix’s new adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s groundbreaking novel A hundred years of lonelinessI’m still reeling. Partly because of the extremely ambitious and lavishly filmed series itself – but above all because of the fact that it was even filmed at all.

A sprawling masterclass in magical realism, the 1967 novel spans seven generations of the fictional Buendía family, blending sex, superstition and the downright surreal. It is a complex series of twisted, bizarre and sometimes grotesque stories driven by deep-rooted, unshakable desires and the doomed characters’ inability to escape their fate – a kind of generational curse that passes from parents to children ( more often than…). not, the tendency to copulate with their own relatives).

Set in the Colombian make-believe town of Macondo from the early 18th century, the book shows how a series of endless civil wars, unusual climate events, and imperialist plantation owners shaped this geographically nebulous corner of Latin America for over a century. Márquez paints this world with such vivid, soulful strokes that it remains etched in my imagination years after reading his novel: Rebeca shoveling a handful of dirt into her mouth; the crazy José Arcadio, tied to a chestnut tree and muttering in Latin; a naked Remedios the Beautiful who paints animals on the walls with her own excrement.

It’s absolutely charming, but not what you’d call an “easy” read: a non-linear, 400+ page text in which the story jumps through time and half the characters have some variation of the same name. In fact, it’s so difficult to keep track of the clan with its multiple generations that a family tree is famously printed on the front of the book.

In a world where algorithms, not humans, call the shots when it comes to commissioning decisions, it seems almost inconceivable that this ambitious masterpiece would get the green light. This is a streaming ecosystem where there are relentless seasons Emily in … (insert European city here) are produced without pause or regret. In which the same “career woman from the big city returns to the small town and falls in love with the simpler life/grumpy but warm-hearted locals” treatment is translated into a staggering number of films per year. Security trumps risk when it comes to reward.

A hundred years of loneliness isn’t just a world away from all that: it’s in a completely different universe. Márquez himself declared it virtually unfilmable during his lifetime and gave the rights to Harvey Weinstein on the condition that he “film the entire book, but publish only one chapter – two minutes long – every year for 100 years.” I would have bet good money that Netflix wouldn’t have touched it bichero (Barge), let alone getting a big-budget, 16-episode Spanish-language epic.

And yet here we are. It feels nothing short of a miracle. As does the fact that the creators managed to do the seemingly impossible: they stayed true to the source material while artfully translating it into visually magnificent storytelling.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a literary adaptation so perfectly done. From the spot-on casting to the sparse but carefully chosen dialogue; From camera shots that move purposefully to follow the characters and captivate the viewer, to music that conjures a world of magic and mysticism, there is an ethereal, fairytale quality that holds your attention by the throat grabs you and won’t let go.

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The first episode begins at the end of the story – we see the Buendía house, ravaged by time; the menacing, bloodstained figure of a corpse beneath a sheet; Armies of ants colonize every surface – before we delve into the past. The opening line mirrors exactly that of the book: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice cream.”

This is an important factor in explaining why the jumble of stories is real functions on screen – much of the dialogue is taken directly from the original, Márquez’s evocative, lush language is placed into the mouth of a narrator to guide us through the strange and captivating narrative. This external, all-powerful voice is crucial in explaining what the characters themselves struggle to show and cannot tell, and in establishing a tone that steers us away from naturalism.

It’s the same tactic used in the 1981 ITV dramatization of Brideshead revisitedoften considered the gold standard for literary adaptations; It, too, treated the beauty of the original text with quiet reverence, which Jeremy Irons’ narrator directly quoted when he described Oxford as “a city of aquatint” that “exhaled the gentle atmosphere of centuries of youth.”

In A hundred years of lonelinessour first journey with José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the Buendía dynasty, and his new wife Ursula Iguaran (who happens to be his cousin) as they begin married life. Right from the start, a battle between superstition and science begins: Ursula is initially too afraid to consummate the marriage after being warned by her mother that she would be given pig’s tails as punishment for incest with deformed children.

The fantastic elements of the story are not neglected and yet never seem bombastic or exaggerated: doors close by themselves to show the discord in the marriage; When the couple imagines living by the sea, waves crash over the parched, cracked earth before them and crash at their feet. Ghosts are presented physically, with a man killed by José Arcadio hanging around the house looking like a dog, clutching his bleeding neck at every turn, and the mysterious child Rebeca, carrying a bag containing her dead parents’ bones appears at the door, rattling and shaking irritably. The is the way you portray magical realism on screen – by embracing and welcoming it without exaggerating or pushing too far into the absurd.

Although they never reach the open water, José Arcadio and Ursula set out to escape their demons, eventually founding the city of Macondo after José Arcadio imagined them in a dream. Later, we see her family grow and become embroiled in their own misguided passions, destined to make the same mistakes as their ancestors over and over again, ad infinitum.

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It’s a brave person to dedicate himself to a book so famous, so idolized and so lavish, and the series’ production was not without controversy. Some locals of Aracataca, Márquez’s birthplace, were unimpressed by the decision to film in the industrial town of Ibagué, 430 miles south, rather than the author’s hometown. The Nobel Prize winner lies at the foot of the Colombian Sierra Nevada in Aracataca, where he lived with his maternal grandparents until he was eight years old. Although he subsequently lived and worked in Paris, New York, Mexico City, Caracas and Barcelona, ​​he owed the city of his youth for the inspiration for much of his writing A hundred years of loneliness.

“We are disappointed that Netflix decided not to film here, but we all know that anyone who is inspired by the series needs to come to Aracataca as this is the heart of Macondo,” said Robinson Mulford, a local high school teacher The Guardian. “You will feel the kindness, the solidarity of the people and everything else that Gabriel García Márquez said about the Colombian Caribbean. They will all be welcomed with love.”

One can only hope that despite the perceived snub, this beautifully made series is received with love. “No matter where you go, you will never escape your fate,” Ursula’s mother warns her daughter in the opening episode. A hundred years of loneliness might just be destined to become that rarest of things: a timeless literary adaptation that’s as popular as the book that inspired it.