One afternoon in 1961 the Colombian poet and novelist Álvaro Mutis climbed seven flights to a friend’s bare-bones apartment in Mexico City and frisbeed a slender book over to him. “Read that, cabrón!” Mutis is supposed to have said. “So you’ll learn how to write.” The book was one of the greatest ghost stories ever written, Pedro Páramo, by the taciturn Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, and the recipient of Mutis’s gift was a young Colombian writer newly settled in Mexico, Gabriel García Márquez, whose own haunted novellas and short stories had already brought him great prestige. In later years García Márquez told the story over and over of how Rulfo’s austere prose, the lack of any apology or explanation for the strange, unhappy universe he created, and the tone of extreme loneliness and emotional privation he established from the very first sentence—“I came to Comala because they told me my father lived here”—inspired him and gave him new hope for a novel whose structure he had been struggling with for so long.
A few years later García Márquez, by then a successful copywriter at an advertising agency, was driving his family to Acapulco for a holiday when a Pauline flash of inspiration forced him to brake and pull over. Awestruck and grateful, he saw at last before him the complete structure of the novel he knew would bring him greatness: the story of his family, which would be at once the story of a childhood and of the senseless, endlessly repeating history of Colombia. The laconic presentation of an alternate reality in Pedro Páramo had made him see how he, too, could eliminate pages of clumsy explanations and clarifications. He could simply describe a world in which ghosts and miracles were as much a part of daily life as the noonday meal. Right then, the legend goes, he made a U-turn on the highway, quit his day job as a copywriter, told his long-suffering wife, Mercedes Barcha, to keep the bill collectors at bay, and sat down to write One Hundred Years of Solitude.1
The facts have been stretched a bit in García Márquez’s varying accounts of this miracle, but what came after is indisputable: 50 million copies sold worldwide, translation into nearly fifty languages, a devotion few novels have ever commanded, a Nobel Prize, all the fame he could ever have aspired to, and now, nearly sixty years after the novel’s sensational debut, an ambitious two-season, sixteen-episode Netflix series. An entire town was created in which to film the various stages of the fictional Macondo’s development from thatch-roof village to boomtown to its decline in the 1920s; the house of the Buendía family was also recreated in its various stages of expansion and collapse. Colombian actors (mostly) appear on-screen; they speak lines taken word for word from the novel with the real music of their own real accents.
With García Márquez’s two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, as executive producers—as children they were in the back seat on the famous aborted ride to Acapulco—Netflix has spared no expense and cut not a single corner in order to remain faithful to the novel. The sincerity of its commitment is evident at every turn, and one can only wish that it had spent a few more years—perhaps not the eighteen that García Márquez spent agonizing over the structure of his feverish novel, but close—considering how (or if, really, or why) words that were the product of a single overwhelming rush of inspiration could be satisfyingly translated by various “creative teams” into the slow-motion unspooling of a narrative through images. Because, unhappily, what so much well-intentioned labor has produced is a dud.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel of genesis and apocalypse. It starts with a couple—José Arcadio Buendía and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán—fleeing the ghost of a murdered man and settling “on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs,” in a world “so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” It ends with a hurricane that erases the town of Macondo and the last of the Buendías, rotting alive in their crumbling house. In between there is a prolonged, bloody, and perfectly useless war, a plague, several murders, a suicide, a massacre, four years of flooding rains, generational waves of frustrated incest, and, as the pages of the novel race toward their conclusion, the fulfillment of a prophecy: the birth of a child with the tail of a pig to parents who are nephew and aunt.
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Integral to the story, and just as real, are the priest who drinks chocolate in order to levitate; a wandering gypsy who comes back from the dead; Remedios Buendía, whose extreme beauty causes her to float up from the sheets she is hanging to dry and disappear into the clouds forever; a rain of dead birds; a man crazed with love and lust who wanders always enveloped in a cloud of yellow butterflies; and a couple whose joyful devotion to fornication causes cattle, dogs, sheep, and pigs to multiply with unheard-of fervor. The miracles, like the tragic wars and the massacres and even the murdered ghost, are metaphors for and child’s-eye views of real events in Colombian history and in García Márquez’s childhood in the mythic backwater town of Aracataca, aka Macondo. The War of a Thousand Days, fought between Liberals and Conservatives from 1899 to 1902, is the novel’s bloody, useless war. The massacre of banana workers no one remembers actually took place in 1928, when government troops were sent in to defend the vast banana plantations around Aracataca at the request of the United Fruit Company. Passing through Aracataca on the same yellow train that first arrived in Macondo “like a kitchen dragging a village behind it” decades before, I was witness to the sun-darkening clouds of yellow butterflies that hatch around the time a certain type of mango tree comes into bloom there. The murdered man who haunts the first Buendía was actually killed by García Márquez’s grandfather, to his endless remorse. And so on.
For the child Gabriel, or Gabito, who was born with wide-open eyes that took in the whole room, just like the novel’s Aureliano Buendía, and who spent a terrified childhood listening to the family accounts of which relative had died in which room, the ghosts and miracles were utterly real, and it would seem that reading Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo was the catalyst that allowed him to see that this was exactly the way his own story should be told. (Indeed, like Rulfo, he starts his novel with a son remembering a father.)
But while the Mexican Rulfo was an austere and diffident writer, García Márquez was a garrulous and affectionate Colombian from the Caribbean coast who deeply loved his characters. He may have been impelled to find a way to tell the story of his childhood, his family, and his country because “he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past,” as the last Buendía says in the closing pages of the book, yet it is a story of the tropics, teeming with vegetation, fecundity, passion, and also a costeño sense of the ridiculous, which, of course, was García Márquez’s own.
What Netflix has skimmed off the top of every page of this effervescent mixture is the melodramatic and the anecdotal, striving all the while for faithfulness rather than originality. Wherever a couple of lines of dialogue appear in the book—there aren’t many—the actors recite them faithfully, but when any of the series’ directors are flummoxed by the need to represent some of the characters’ more intricate emotions, a wan off-screen voice reads the corresponding paragraph in the book. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s gradual transition from rebellious seeker of justice to heartless warmonger is presented by a change of camera angle, so that the handsome Claudio Cataño’s high cheekbones and aquiline nose suddenly look vampirish and mean. There’s an effort to make the series as funny as the book, but like the staging of the various miracles, the attempts to present literally what are throwaway lines of text bomb every time.
Early in his career García Márquez became fascinated by the possibilities of film. When he and Mercedes established themselves in Mexico, he quickly became part of a fashionable avant-garde that dreamed of creating a groundbreaking Mexican New Wave. He wrote or cowrote (with Carlos Fuentes) several scripts and recognized that the results were always mediocre—although never as terrible as subsequent adaptations of his own novels, like Francesco Rosi’s squirmingly awful version of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He stopped writing scripts, and in an interview in a Havana film magazine in 1969 he spoke at length on the subject:
I always thought that the cinema, through its tremendous visual power, was the perfect means of expression. All my books before One Hundred Years of Solitude are hampered by that uncertainty. There is an immoderate desire for the visualization of character and scene, a millimetric account of the time of dialogue and action and an obsession with indicating point of view and frame. While actually working in cinema, however, I came to realize not only what could be done but also what couldn’t be done; I saw that the predominance of the image over other narrative elements was certainly an advantage but also a limitation, and this was for me a startling discovery because only then did I become aware of the fact that the possibilities of the novel are unlimited.2
Perhaps Rodrigo García Barcha, a very fine filmmaker, and possibly as excitable as his father always was about grand new projects, thought that this “startling discovery” could be overlooked. Or maybe he and his brother, Gonzalo, figured that One Hundred Years of Solitude would eventually be filmed once copyright ran out (about a half-century from now), so they might as well promote this respectful project while they were still around to have a say in it. They said as much in an interview with the Colombian journalist Patricia Lara.
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And so we have what we have. An elaborate recreation of the history of Macondo, a town that never existed, that curiously seems to refer more confidently to other styles of filmed narration than to the meanings of the novel. The series opens with gorgeous, if irrelevant, travelogue views of gorgeous Colombia and then fumbles along, adding dialogue that clashes with García Márquez’s watertight epigrammatic style whenever the two forms appear in the same scene. It treats characters mockingly that he loved, like Pietro Crespi, and interprets the Buendías daughters’ rivalry over him as melodrama rather than an exploration of the grim possibilities of rancor.
As a result we soon find ourselves in Brazilian telenovela land, without that genre’s genius for family sagas, achieved partly by placing the camera as if it were another member of the family, observing the laughter and tears close up. By the time we get to the last episode of the first season, into which all the ravages of war in the book are compressed, Marleyda Soto, who has been acting her heart out as the fierce matriarch Úrsula Buendía, is reduced to shedding copious tears over this corpse and that corpse-to-be, and we have descended into the weepy chasms of Mexican telenovela land. I’ve asked around, and the consensus among five of my friends is that Úrsula never cries. She’s too busy putting food on the table, goddammit.
The film that the Netflix series can most usefully be compared to is Encanto, an animated Disney production from 2021 about a big multigenerational family once displaced by violence, ruled by a matriarch, and now living in an expandingly roomy house in a charming village that exists because of the family’s magical protection. That a Disney work should owe something to García Márquez is not surprising, and I mean no disrespect to Encanto. Although it’s not as triumphantly charming as an earlier Disney production, Coco (2017), it is a lovely movie that knows where it’s going and gets there. What is surprising is that the Netflix series should seem to take so much from Disney, from the sets to the casting of Úrsula Buendía. Soto is a worthy actress, but the character she really resembles is Abuela, the matriarch of Encanto, solid wig included.
Readers who love the novel deeply may or may not view the series with gritted teeth, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. Season one is out; season two is being filmed. It may be better, or people may like it more than they seem to like season one. Those who loathe it or were simply too bored to finish watching it seem to prefer the Netflix film of Pedro Páramo (2024). But as Gonzalo García Barcha startlingly told Patricia Lara, “We’ve seen great classic works adapted for the screen, and the works have survived the adaptation.” So will One Hundred Years of Solitude.
