The trick to adapting a popular novel

In his main work A hundred years of lonelinessColombian writer Gabriel García Márquez turned a centuries-old history lesson into a fascinating read. His prose is rhythmic and rambling. He invents both banal and magical stories. And as he delves into the fantastical lives of the Buendía family, who founded the mythical city of Macondo, García Márquez displays a transcendent ability to alter time. Take, for example, the book’s masterful opening line: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice cream.”

Until his death in 2014, García Márquez claimed that it was impossible to adapt the book into a film. A hundred years of lonelinesssaid he, “it is written against The Cinema” – which is why the author repeatedly rejected attempts to acquire the rights after its publication in 1967. An avid film lover and screenwriter, he had already approved previous adaptations of his works such as: Chronicle of a Death Foretold And Love in times of cholerabut none were well received by critics. He insisted that the scope and voice of his most famous book would only work on screen if it were told in Spanish over 100 hours – or, according to other reports, a full 100 years.

Read: How A hundred years of loneliness became a classic

The 16-episode Netflix version, the first half of which is streaming now, isn’t 100 hours long, but it’s still an excellent translation – as haunting and wondrous as García Márquez’s readers would hope. The show was filmed in Colombia and told in Spanish, as García Márquez requested. The author’s sons have received the blessing, who serve as executive producers. Book purists may find these efforts insufficient to convince them of the legitimacy of the production. But his effort to faithfully represent the novel, including by recruiting Latin American directors and an almost entirely local cast, has resulted in perhaps the best adaptation of a so-called “unadaptable” novel to date. Netflixs A hundred years of loneliness corresponds to the raw ambition of García Márquez. Watching it feels like watching a beautiful, strange, enchanting dream.

That’s fitting, because Macondo Is a dream – a place that José Arcadio Buendía (played by Marco González), the patriarch of the family, imagines in his sleep one night. If the series At the beginning, José Arcadio, a man prone to obsessions, has just married his cousin, the pragmatic Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales). Their family grows and so does the town they found in the middle of the swamp. The house in Buendía has been the scene of many strange characters and events over the years: there’s a man who regularly drops by with bizarre inventions, a dirt-eating girl who carries around a bag containing her parents’ shaking bones, and refugees who… Fleeing a civil war creates a “resistance to nostalgia” in a man.

The Netflix version shifts the chronology slightly and tells the Buendías saga more linearly; The added dialogue helps the viewer navigate the sprawling timeline. (Although the novel covers five generations of Buendías, many of whom are named one after the other, by the end of the first half the series has only just begun to introduce the third generation.) Still, watching the various members of the family is just as moving as they are grow up and die, thrive and suffer, fall in love (often with each other) and repeat the mistakes of their ancestors – just like reading about them. Their strange stories illustrate that history tends to repeat itself because memory is fallible. The opposing forces of idealism and practicality, loneliness makes it clear that they play an essential role in shaping not just families but entire civilizations.

Book-to-film adaptations can struggle with the conventions of television, such as casting actors and adhering to an episodic structure with discrete, complete storylines. The best attempts understand that overcoming these limitations is not the goal; Rather, their aim is to evoke what it is like to read the novel. A series based on an exhilarating science fiction novel can illustrate concepts to amazing effect. Interpreting an introspective relationship drama can make your heart ache with poignant looks. Presenting a strong historical epic can transform exciting narratives into epic set pieces. In this sense, even the most idiosyncratic story can work in the medium as long as the rendition reflects the emotional impact of the source material.

Netflixs loneliness is successful because it has the same sense of revelation as the book. The camerawork recreates the novel’s playful approach to time, often gliding through Macondo as entire years pass in a matter of seconds. The richly detailed production design makes the city feel simultaneously real and dreamlike: the actors wander through large sets wearing period costumes whose color and fabric subtly change over the decades; Doors sometimes open by themselves and pieces of furniture move as if guided by an invisible hand. At one point the score even contains, as my subtitles put it, “ethereal vocalization.” However, these techniques do not appear extravagant, just flourishes that emphasize the half-remembered nature of the original story.

What’s most impressive is how the series visually captures García Márquez’s style of “magical realism.” The author viewed surreality as inherent to life in Latin America, where metaphors and myths often dominate storytelling. Numerous moments embody this worldview: in one episode, every Macondo resident eventually falls asleep after suffering from a “plague of insomnia” and keels over, creating a stream of sleeping bodies in the streets. When a young girl begins menstruating, she is seen lying in a bathtub in the middle of the jungle as a pool of blood blooms in the water. One of the most magnificent paintings shows a man tied to a chestnut tree in a courtyard, sitting silently in the rain as sunlight filters through the leaves and raindrops. Such photographs demonstrate García Márquez’s talent for combining the ordinary with the extraordinary and transforming prosaic developments into enduring fables. And when the author’s figurative language — such as the way he describes how a character “felt his bones filling with foam” — seems too far-fetched to depict, the series offers it as narrative instead.

Read: The Most Unadaptable Book in Fiction

But a TV adaptation can only replicate the maddening energy of the text so much. Several scenes had me reaching for my copy of the book, only to remember how García Márquez’s prose captured my imagination instead. Of José Arcadio’s search for gold with his followers exploring the lands around Macondo, the author wrote: “For a week they walked almost wordlessly, like somnambulists, through a universe of sadness lit only by the faint reflections of glowing insects.” and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.” The series offers only brief glimpses of his crew wandering through the jungle, looking exhausted by their endeavor.

Still something for Netflix loneliness What I have done, primarily for the better, is to reject a literal translation of the book in favor of an evocative translation. I was just as fascinated by the Buendías on screen, whose story is now enlivened by the beautiful world that surrounds them, as I was when I first encountered them on the page. “Writing is a hypnotic act,” García Márquez once said. By harnessing the passion behind the author’s words, Netflix loneliness creates its own fascinating effect.

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