Updated Jan 9, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.*
BOGOTÁ — I’ve seen the first two episodes of the Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the great novel by the greatest of our novelists, Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. And I was happy.
The pictorial Macondo, the fictional town and setting for the story, was like the one I’ve had in my mind for the past 50 years. José Arcadio (the “patriarch”) is José Arcadio, Ursula (his wife) is Ursula and their children are as I remembered them. Likewise Pilar Ternera and Melquiades. They all speak as I heard them speak in my mind in the half century since I first read the book.
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The light in Macondo was also as I imagined it — as were the trees, breeze, rainforest, swamp and sea; they were all as the book had conjured in my mind. This was, veritably, a visual repetition of the chapters I had read, which I felt were mine again, so close and intimate. Everything in this production was softly Colombian yet universal: It might have been anywhere in the world.
So the series’ two directors, Laura Mora and Álex García López, share my vision of the novel, forged over a lifetime of rereading it. I understand others may disagree but I can say that García Márquez will not, at the very least, be turning in his grave over this adaptation of his novel. He might even be happy, or relieved, who knows?
Timeless beauty revived
The chromatic, effusive ambience that first came into being in words, is now cinematographic or audiovisual. And it will spread to reach many more people on this planet, especially children — boys and girls, who will now enter this awesome world of immense beauty. They didn’t know it existed and will find it was just there, waiting to be seen to touch their sensitivity and make their little hearts skip a beat.
It is not uncommon to recreate or rearrange some of those monumental works of art.
I strongly believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book, stands alongside such towering works as The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Hamlet or The Divine Comedy. It is neither inferior in formal terms — meaning its verbal constituents like language or the author’s innovative and poetic use of Spanish — nor in symbolic terms or the depth and mesmerizing beauty of situations created therein as images of the human condition.
It is not uncommon to recreate or rearrange some of those monumental works of art that last and last without losing their appeal. It is a way of bringing them back, once every generation, into our lives and homes to accompany us as we grapple daily with time and death.
They are, indeed, a reminder of the greatness of those timeless works, which resides in their ability to help us in our struggle with death, oblivion and extinction.
Cinema meets poetry
I recalled while watching the episodes another moment when one art form spilled, happily, into another, by which I mean the films of the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. I dare say Netflix’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” isn’t far below Pasolini.
It is, from what I see, as well conceived and crafted as Pasolini’s poetic adaptations of The Decameron, the Gospel of Matthew, Oedipus Rex and One Thousand and One Nights.
It has that undefinable light or unfathomable quality of light that dissolved time as I watched, entranced, like a child.
*Originally published Dec. 26, 2024, this article was updated Jan. 9, 2025 with enriched media.
