Surprise: The ‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’ TV Adaptation Is Magically Great

On March 22, 2023, I published an article about the future adaptation that Netflix would make of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, which won him the Nobel Prize in literature and which I have never liked. I know that it is a perfectly-written book that established the genre of magical realism, a genre that labeled Latinos for years. But it’s not the book for me.

At that moment, I raised my questions about whether it was wise to make an adaptation of such a seminal work for not only Colombians but almost everyone who speaks Spanish on this planet. Time passed and the series came to an end in December. And a lot of strange things have happened regarding this series (not a miniseries, as initially thought); For example, it is impossible to find critiques, reviews of the series in Spanish, made by Latin media…not even in Colombia itself. It’s as if no one dares to touch the series; speaking good or bad. Zero. Nothing. And the other thing, much more weird and intriguing, is that it took me watching this first season (of eight episodes) twice and watching the last two episodes three times to try to answer a seemingly simple question: “Did I like this? Yes or no?”

And the answer… Well, this is where everything gets complicated. Because it is NOT an adaptation of the novel…it is literally, textually the novel. And that, in no way, was what I expected.

I consulted with many Colombians to find out their opinion. All the answers were different.  But it all started like this: if you haven’t read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m sorry, watching this series will be very strange, and confusing. For this part of the audience, a brief summary, One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates the adventures, history and all kinds of things that happened to seven generations of the Buendía family, founders of a town called Macondo, which is located in the middle of nowhere in Colombia.

The typical Latin oral storytelling tradition, what people call magical realism, nourishes the work. These are the stories and details of everyday life that break with the usual way of things. What happens suddenly seem simply impossible, unimaginable, but is finally real It is an extensive novel lacking dialogue, with a narrative that is sometimes subtle, sometimes harsh, always poetic. And that’s all you need to know.

Now, if you have already read the novel, well, you will have grounds to comment on the quality of this series. I started watching it, certainly with great expectations, the same one that all of Latin America had. And what happened during the pilot? I fell asleep like a hibernating bear.

And that surprised me considering that the series begins with a classic scene and a voice-over that literally reads large fragments of the novel. By this I mean: what you will see on the screen is One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the pure novel on screen. But I honestly didn’t like the voiceover and that was the first thing that turned me off; Then, the performances of the characters in the first stage, when they are young, did not convince me either. The pace of the first two episodes is very slow and each episode is too long. If you don’t have faith in this series, you have to leave it there. But I continued.

As the episodes went by, I got into that world that I once hated so much; and slowly, very slowly I was in the town of Macondo; and here I must give several applauses: to the entire technical team, to the two directors who shared the episodes, Alex García López and Laura Mora, for showing some of the best visuals of Colombia that I have seen, and the arrival of the actors Diego Vásquez, playing José Arcadio Buendía as a mature man and the great Marleyda Soto, as Úrsula, also in her maturity (this woman deserves all the awards and at least a statue in a public square). Everything changed here. Furthermore, the voiceover  reduced to what was necessary.

The maximum applause goes to Claudio Castaño, who plays the super legendary Colonel Aureliano Buendía, yes, the one who was in front of the firing squad If it weren’t for the false mustache… bah, never mind the false mustache, this man gives the great performance of his life, as a character that every reader of the novel longed to see.

Then we advance episode after episode with the first generations of the Buendías, the birth and growth of Macondo and…what happened to magical realism? But..it was the novel. It was One Hundred Years Of Solitude! Hey, don’t I hate this book anymore?

Honestly I was expecting something like what I once saw in the movie Big Fish, which has a lot of magical realism. I mean, I expected to see special effects everywhere. But. there are none here. The novel presents many almost surreal images, but what bothered me at first, because I wanted to see magical realism with great effects, ended up pleasing me as I felt that the series was an act of love for the novel and humility and not a crude display of CGI. With the images of each natural corner, it was more than enough.

As the series progressed, as life in Macondo progressed, but also wars, deaths, sex, incest, the sacred and profane. Episode 7 arrived, one of the best episodes of any show filmed in this era in Latin American cinematography. Here the series grabbed me by the shirt and threw me against the wall, only to get up and watch a complete and utter magical episode 8 that I can only summarize as poetry. And a huge and heartfelt tribute to Gabriel García Márquez. It is a huge, huge achievement.

I want to close this article with an interesting phrase said by a Colombian, Natalia Carvajal Parra, a specialist in two of the most important things in Colombia: coffee and literature: “One can have lived, then die and not have seen this series… But one cannot have lived and then died, without reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

In the end…Did I like the series? The answer is in one of the scrolls that the gypsy Melquiades left. But I’m ready for Season 2.