One Hundred Years of Solitude is the epitome of magical realism. It’s a plague of insomnia that leaves residents of an entire town sleepless, to the

A mythical, historic Macondo: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ becomes a Netflix series

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2024-11-24 21:00:06

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the epitome of magical realism. It’s a plague of insomnia that leaves residents of an entire town sleepless, to the point of forgetting who they are. It is Mauricio Babilonia beset by yellow butterflies. It is a bag of bones that moves without explanation. It is Remedios la Bella rising to the sky. It is the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar following José Arcadio Buendía everywhere he goes. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tale of omens, superstitions and magic. But it is also the Thousand Days’ War, the most lethal civil war in Colombian history, which took place between 1899 and 1902. It is the Banana Massacre, when the military shut down a United Fruit Company workers’ strike with a bloodbath.

In this dichotomy between a mythical Macondo, “the land that no one had promised them,” and the history of a nation marked by violence, stands the first audiovisual adaptation of one of the greatest Spanish-language novels of all time. It’s been nearly six years since Netflix announced in early 2019 that it had purchased the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece. In the words of Rodrigo García, the son of the Nobel laureate, the writer left just three guidelines for audiovisual interpretation of the work: that such a production be told, “in many hours, in Spanish and in Colombia.” On December 11, Netflix will release the first season of one of the most ambitious audiovisual projects in the history of Latin America.

The series will tell the tale of seven generations of Buendías over the course of 16 episodes, divided evenly between two seasons. The project implied a serious challenge to all involved, amplified by the sky-high expectations generated by the adaptation of a novel that has sold over 50 million copies around the world — not to mention those of its home country, where the story is seen as a reflection of society itself. This, according to its screenwriter Natalia Santa, in an interview that took place by video call in mid-October. “For us, it was very important to understand the novel first as a great document of Colombian history and as a portrait of our society, how we are as a nation, a nation that has suffered from centuries of violence. One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a stark portrait of violence in Colombia, what it has meant on a political level, but also its impact on everyday life, on families.”