José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is an inventor whose projects straddle the visionary and the impossible. Although some of the schemes work, most—such as his attempt to extract gold using magnetic ingots—end in noble, quixotic failure.
The Buendía family arrived on our screens last week, in the first eight episodes of Netflix’s 16-part adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel. It’s a daring venture; especially given García Márquez, who regularly rejected offers for the film rights, wrote that he preferred people to imagine his characters “just as they want to, and not with the borrowed face of an actor”. Aside from in the 1980s, when a Japanese director made a film loosely based on the text, this is the first time it’s been adapted.
One Hundred Years of Solitude describes the rise and fall of both the Buendías and Macondo, the town they establish in Colombia’s Caribbean region. It’s a novel with minimal suspense, sparse conflict and limited character development. It works because, although occasionally overdone, the prose is sumptuous. García Márquez’s brilliance is in language and rhythm, and each sentence demands that you read the next.
An adaptation thus faces difficult, if not intractable, problems. Is it possible to create enough drama from a story that lacks a propulsive plot? And how do you compellingly adapt a novel whose foundational virtue is its narrative voice? To make things even trickier, the text has limited dialogue, the cape of magical realism and touches of postmodernism.
The screenwriters knew what they were in for. Natalia Santa, one of a team of four, tells me that they began from the premise that their task was not to adapt based on literary merit, but on televisual potential. Santa explains that they needed to prioritise conflict and restrict the role of García Márquez’s inimitable narrator. “We tried to be very deliberate with that narrative voice,” she says. “We tried to use the narrator only to bring the musicality, the poetics of the novel… to narrate things that we couldn’t describe audiovisually.”
The adaptation is noteworthy for its approach to García Márquez’s magical realism. It eschews straightforward fantasy and is faithful to the tone of a novel where supernatural events are regarded as mundane. For example, when José Arcadio Buendía is haunted by Prudencio Aguilar (the man he killed before founding Macondo), the ghost either appears on screen as a hallucination or as just another character. And at the fair where the gypsies exhibit their flying carpet, the magic rug discreetly glides away in the background.
The series is even committed to the novel’s postmodern conceit. The opening shots are of a book composed in Sanskrit—a subtle nod to the fact One Hundred Years of Solitude is mentioned in the novel itself as a book written by Melquíades, the leader of the gypsies.
In other important elements, the series is not so successful. Most significantly, I had expected García Márquez’s characterisation (which, along with narrative voice, is the finest part of the novel) to translate well onto the screen. However, detached from the prose, the characters struggle to retain their charm. The Melquíades of the novel is understated and mysterious, but the demands of television mean he is given more dialogue and loses his laconic, enigmatic qualities. Having to speak more, Melquíades becomes blander—a “wise man” from the east who utters platitudes such as “I like your enthusiasm,” and “Experience… is everything in life.”
It’s similar in the case of Úrsula, the Buendía family matriarch. In the novel, Úrsula is astute, enterprising and indomitable. Every time she speaks, you expect her to say something wry or resourceful. In the series, her speech is often banal—such as when she kindlily reminds her children to wash their hands.
The adaptation also has too much sex. Way too much sex. Sex is sometimes part of the Buendía family drama, but here it recurs unnecessarily. The screenwriters may have wanted to prioritise conflict, but the regularity of sex scenes slows down the accumulation of tension. It may even betray a bigger issue: a lack of dramatic material.
Ultimately, the weakness of the series is fundamental: One Hundred Years of Solitude cannot be told faithfully and also provide the ingredients needed for a convincing TV drama. And although the screenwriters make a strong case for constraining the novel’s narrator, García Márquez without narration is like Van Gogh in greyscale.
Many viewers will, I suspect, stop after the end of the first episode. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that one feels no compulsion to keep watching. Television is a different commitment to a novel and brings different expectations. Although plenty of people don’t finish the book (probably because of the lack of drama), readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude have more reason to persist than viewers. Reading would also be less time-consuming. Netflix’s first season runs to eight and a half hours and, even if season two is a few hours shorter, it would be faster to read (or listen) to the book.
What confirms the hubris of Netflix’s adaptation is that it gets so many details right. Great thought evidently went into every decision, and it’s hard to imagine another production doing any better. The problem is that, like a venture dreamt up by José Arcadio Buendía, the task is simply impossible.
