For me, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has a near-mythical status like no other book. One day during my summer vacation when I was about 14 years old, I was bored and found the 1978 paperback edition of Picador on my parents’ bookshelf. On a whim, I opened it and read one of the most iconic first sentences in existence.
“Years later, when he faced a firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembered the distant afternoon when his father took him out to discover the ice.”
I immediately sat down on the couch and read for another three hours. I trace my life as a literary reader back to that first sentence of that afternoon, which I still know by heart. Since then, I’ve only re-read it once, ten years later, because I wanted to wait until I forgot what happened. I’ll read it again as soon as the details fade from my memory again, but I can’t wait.
In case you haven’t read it yet (I know it’s one of the most famous books in the world, just in case), Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel It follows six generations of a large family living in the fictional town of Macondo. I read this book before I knew what Magic Realism was, the genre that García Márquez represented, and I was shocked. How can this happen? It was so convincingly weird. In the process, a baby is born with a pig’s tail, a trail of blood runs through the town to signal someone’s death, a rainstorm lasts for almost five years, someone literally ascends to heaven, and ghosts and Many spirits appear.
In 2019, Netflix announced that One Hundred Years of Solitude would be turned into a television series. That sounded like madness to me. García Márquez himself refused to sell the film rights to the book. I didn’t want it to be produced in a language other than Spanish, and I felt it was obvious that the book had a supernatural spookiness and a huge cast of characters and time. -Bending roundness cannot be applied. However, the new series included some of his surviving family members and was scheduled to be filmed in Spanish on location in Colombia. And unlike movies, Netflix has as many episodes as it deems necessary to tell the entire complex story. Maybe there was hope after all, but I was still nervous when the first part of the series finally came out on December 11th. There were so many things that could go wrong.
Only the first eight of the 16 total episodes will be released, the rest will be released in 2025 (as per García Márquez’s wishes, they are actually in Spanish, with an available English dub). But I have to say this. It was a pleasant surprise. It starts with the first sentence of the narration and sticks very closely to the events of the book. But more importantly, the atmosphere of the book is there. The series is unapologetically weird, full of weird sex and wild obsession, and it’s hot, steamy, and foreboding.
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The worry when translating a book like this into a visual medium is that some of the magic of the story is lost if some of the shape-shifting surreal elements in the book have to be literally depicted. I wonder if that’s the case. Inevitably so. The show will never be as engrossing as the book, but it’s not embarrassingly so. In one disturbing scene, José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the family, wanders through a dream world and enters a river, where he meets his dead friend Melquiades, and through a door enters a room where he sees his unborn son. One of his ancestors is reading a note. He walks away into the stars, hand in hand with his dead friend and the man he killed in his youth. The star then turns into a small yellow flower and rain falls over Macondo. Of course, I can imagine all of this, and I do when I read books, but there is a sense of satisfaction in actually seeing something that has existed only as a scene in my head for so many years. did.
However, the parts that really have to be given to the TV version are very mediocre. Here are some names of characters from One Hundred Years of Solitude: José Arcadio Buendía, Aureliano Buendía, again José Arcadio Buendía, Aureliano José, Arcadio, José Arcadio II. This is Jose Arcadio, who is different from Aureliano II. Fourth but unnumbered José Arcadio, Aureliano Babilonia, simply Aureliano. There are three characters called Remedios.
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I understand why this happens. The novel deals with genealogy and inheritance, how the characteristics of the father are expressed in the son, and how family life is complicated by the fascination with infidelity and pseudo-incest. It makes sense that many of the characters would share names across generations. But it’s also the root of the only thing I’ve struggled with. In both cases, when reading, I had to go back to the complex family tree at the beginning to see exactly which Aurelianos were doing what and when, and who wasn’t. I can’t help but break my flow. Now, perhaps this is making me stupid, but if so, I’d be willing to bet that many others are just as stupid. I would argue that it is confusing. But in this series, fortunately, that problem has been resolved. I know which Jose Arcadio it is, because he looks different than the others.
Yes, in some ways it goes against the spirit of the book to make this clear. Clarity is not the purpose of novels. It’s about confusion and uncertainty and impossibility. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to immerse myself more completely in Macondo than as a reader. This adaptation has a clear reason for its subsequent existence. all.
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