Considered impossible to film – by even Gabriel García Márquez himself – the series brings the mythical Macondo to life
With its generational narrative of love, betrayal and intrigue, and an epic backdrop of civil war and fantastical goings-on, One Hundred Years of Solitude was long considered to be an impossible novel to adapt to the screen.
The work’s author, Gabriel García Márquez, even claimed that the sprawling novel had been written precisely to prove that the written word had a vaster scope than the cinema.
Yet against the odds, Netflix appears to have successfully translated Márquez’s magnum opus to television, to the relief of many Colombians, who are fiercely protective of the late writer – and fed up with other on-screen depictions of their country.
“I was completely skeptical. This book means so much to me, how on earth do you translate it into a series?” said Irene Arenas, a 34-year-old English teacher in Bogotá who read the novel for the first time when she was 13. “But it overwhelmed me with its beauty. I watched every episode in two days, I cried several times, and I’ve just gone and bought the book again.”
The novel tells the century-spanning tale of the founders of the mythical town of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula, and their descendants, in a narrative which sometimes parallels the history of Colombia, and sometimes does not.
Swarms of yellow butterflies flutter constantly around one character, children are conceived with pig tails and the blood of a dead son trickles through the village until it reaches the feet of his mother.
But what makes good literary fiction does not necessarily make good television – the timeline jumps constantly backwards and forwards, the plot includes much sex and little dialogue, many characters share the same name – and Márquez insisted that both the form and content of the novel meant it could never be adapted.
Netflix’s answer, in collaboration with the author’s family, was to condense the century-spanning narrative into 16 episodes in “one of the most ambitious productions in Latin American history”.
Beyond the technical challenges, the producers also had to confront the legacy of Márquez himself, which looms large over the country of his birth. His face adorns the national currency and his novel has been compulsory reading for generations of Colombian schoolchildren.
“One Hundred Years is Colombia’s national poem,” said author Ricardo Silva Romero.
The novel’s exploration of Colombia’s bloody, cyclical history has in turn shaped the nation’s own self-image.
“It’s positive, it’s romantic, but it’s honest, and that’s the reason why I cried,” Arenas said. “It really shows how Colombia is in this state of eternal return where we keep going back to the same place. How we are passionate but also obsessive, which is not always a good thing. And how there is a bit of outlaw in every Colombian in this country that is in spite of itself.”
The series has also come as a relief to Colombians weary of depictions of their country in television as a lawless and violent playground for narcos.
“We struggle not to be seen as a country of cocaine and drug cartels,” said Adrian Lemus, a business administrator who grew up on the country’s Caribbean coast. “Gabo’s work is an example of resilience, strength and community – virtues that are carved into Colombians from childhood.”
As Márquez had requested before his death in 2014, the series was shot in Colombia, in Spanish with an all-Colombian cast.
To bring the fictional Macondo to life, Netflix constructed four different Macondo sets, transported dozens of native trees from the coast and contracted 150 communities to make thousands of handmade artifacts.
Netflix will not disclose the budget for the series but says it took six years to make and is the most expensive in Latin American history.
“The landscapes in the series are identical to the ones I see every day,” said Maria Fernanda Cortés, a 34-year-old an industrial designer who lives in Guachaca, a small town on the Caribbean coast. “The trees, the intense heat, the crystal-clear green rivers and the blue seas. It has made me feel like I live in Macondo.”
Cortés said that like the novel, the TV series succeeded because it reflected the reality of Colombia – a country where superstition abounds, senseless war seems perennial and natural beauty exceeds the imagination.
“It’s something that only people here understand because we live in a place where inexplicable things often happen that border on the magical,” she said.