TV
There’s Never Been a Better Time for a ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ TV Series
Gabriel García Márquez’s masterwork was once considered impossible to adapt for the screen, but modern production budgets and the recent boom of Spanish-language television means now is as good a time as any to bring the grandiose story of the Buendía family to life
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” begins Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the multi-generational tale of a small Colombian village often cited as the finest achievement in Latin American literature. It’s this opening line that would go on to become the novel’s most iconic. In one sentence, Márquez opens a Pandora’s box of questions in a way that only his writing could; the reader is dropped into a fictional world of familial feuds, political upheaval and magical realism entirely detached from their own, abruptly introduced to the beginnings of an epic narrative which quite literally spans an entire century.
How, then, could such a story ever be faithfully lifted from the four-hundred pages of a novel and re-told through the grubby screen of a laptop? Last year, Netflix acquired the rights to produce a Spanish-language television adaptation, with the author’s two sons — Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo García Barcha — in tow as executive producers. If ever there was a time to adapt the seemingly-unadaptable, the golden age of literature-inspired television — the era of Game of Thrones, Normal People and Killing Eve — seems as good a time as any.
Márquez’s desire to not see a compressed on-screen adaptation of his most famous work is well-documented. “For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to Cien Años de Soledad”, Rodrigo Garcia said in a Netflix statement, “because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice.” Márquez, who died in 2014, was no fan of Hollywood’s tendency to dilute grand literary narratives (as was the case with poorly-received adaptations of his novels Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera), and questions of morality arise from defying the wishes of an author who spent much of his life rebuffing attempts to dramatize his magnum opus.
If ever there was a time to adapt the seemingly-unadaptable, the golden age of literature-inspired television seems as good a time as any
But the bee in Márquez’s bonnet was not a rejection of the ambition but of the medium. His opposition stemmed from the technological limits of the day and an unwillingness on the part of mainstream Western culture to embrace a Spanish-language product. Today, though, those challenges no longer exist. “In the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides.”, say Márquez’s sons. And they’re right to be optimistic.
Narcos, Elite and Money Heist have all proven lucrative investments for the streaming giant, shows which have rivalled their English-language counterparts in both viewing figures and critical reception. Roma, too, was the talk of Hollywood in 2018, and proved audiences’ willingness to embrace Latin American culture on-screen. Television producers are now afforded the luxury of time and money in ways denied to the medium in years gone by. The sheer variety of Netflix’s ever-expanding offering attests to the value in prioritising creative freedom over the cut-throat Hollywood standards which have scarred the credibility of countless promising projects (look no further than Warner Bros’ attempts to kick-start a King Arthur franchise), and a greater flexibility in length means a novel like Márquez’s — where every character arc is as gripping as the last — is permitted the run-time it not only deserves, but demands. One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Netflix Original is no longer looking like the bad idea it once seemed.
Of course, Márquez’s fictional town of Macondo is no Medellín, Las Encinas or Madrid (the locales of those aforementioned Netflix successes). In the world of the novel, the author’s trademark blending of magic with reality means indescribable happenings are commonplace. The supernatural, for Márquez, is mundane, and the mundane supernatural. An incestuous marriage results in a child with a pig tail. Villagers are more interested in a merchant’s magnet than his flying carpet. In one chapter, it rains “for four years, eleven months, and two days”. But these seemingly-impossible events are met with nonchalance and are neither explained nor dwelled upon, such is the ability of a novel to build an utterly convincing environment which bears little resemblance to reality. It will be the challenge of a television series to trim and prioritise elements of the story while maintaining this sense of depth, and the old adage “a picture paints a thousand words” seems misplaced when considering the words used by an author like Márquez.
If the producers are smart with their source, it could prove a series filled with unpredictable twists and turns while remaining absolutely faithful to the original story
That said, there’s no reason to believe that Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude won’t span several seasons. The novel itself reads as if written in increments of decades, separated by the coming and going of old faces as they find themselves drawn back to Macondo through family or failure. If the producers are smart with their source, it could prove a series filled with unpredictable twists and turns while remaining absolutely faithful to the original story. Where other literature-based shows have run out of steam when reaching the end of their source material (a certain dragon-featuring fantasy series, perhaps?), Márquez’s novel is so dense that it necessitates a high episode count without the need to spend big on expensive CGI or wage bills. The risk, it seems, will simply be the producers’ willingness to trust — and translate — the domestic drama of the story.
In any case, Netflix’s enthusiasm to secure the rights to this holy grail of Latin American novels suggests a faith in their ability to do it justice. A track record of uber-successful series in recent years, both English-speaking and non-English speaking, means Márquez’s beloved One Hundred Years of Solitude is in the right hands at the right time. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait one hundred years for it to arrive.
