One Hundred Years of Solitude: Why Gabriel García Márquez was wary of film adaptation

For Netflix, the series marks a real coup since it has managed to add to its kitty a humdinger of a novel, inarguably one of the best books ever written in the Spanish language, which reached the English-speaking world in an exquisite translation by Gregory Rabassa. The fact that it has been translated into 45 other languages and sold more than 50 million copies (according to the publisher) ever since its publication means that it enjoys a universal fandom that few novels can boast of. In the teaser, a character reads from the mythical diary of the irrepressible Melquiades (a gypsy who dies and comes back to life several times throughout the novel), transporting us to the isolated fictional town of Macondo (where multiple generations of the Buendía family grapples with its legacy) to witness Colonel José Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cataño), the patriarchal figure and the first human being born in , Macondo, standing before a firing squad, and remembering, well, that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was ‘written against cinema’

“What follows are breathtaking scenes of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán’s journey in search of happiness, fleeing the curse placed upon their lineage,” reads a statement from Netflix. The synopsis of the series reads: “Married against their parents’ wishes, cousins José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán leave their village behind and embark on a long journey in search of a new home. Accompanied by friends and adventurers, their journey culminates with the founding of a utopian town on the banks of a river of prehistoric stones that they baptize Macondo. Several generations of the Buendía lineage will mark the future of this mythical town, tormented by madness, impossible loves, a bloody and absurd war, and the fear of a terrible curse that condemns them, without hope, to one hundred years of solitude.”

Directed by Alex García López, who has also been roped in to direct Star Wars’ June 2024 release The Acolyte, and Laura Mora Ortega (Killing Jesus, The Kings of the World, Brotherhood), it has been shot in Marquez’s home country, Columbia. The series is being touted to be one of the most ambitious Latin American productions. It’s really a big deal because several filmmakers have waited for this for nearly six decades. Márquez, in his lifetime, adamantly resisted selling its film rights for the simple reason that he saw the novel, a microcosm that contains macrocosms, as truly and completely unfilmable. It’s believed that when a major producer approached him with a substantial offer (read an astronomical amount), he had briefly agreed to reconsider, only to come up with a rather unusual caveat; his condition was that the film had to be shot in its entirety, in tune with the scale and scope of the novel, with absolutely no abridgements, and it had to be released not at once, but in yearly episode over a century: 100 years, no less. 

While that is impracticable, the trick, one would argue, lies in condensing the novel for the screenplay in a manner that it doesn’t lose its essence and retains the flavour and magic of the original story. The cinematic medium, after all, has got enough techniques to squeeze or compress the passage of time, just as it can stretch it. But Márquez didn’t want to take a chance. He had sold the rights for Love in the Time of Cholera (for $3 million), his most humane novel, and one of the greatest mystic love stories that acquired a life of its own in Edith Grossman’s fine translation, when he was battling with the onset of dementia, and was concerned about his finances and his family’s future. Mike Newell, known for his literary adaptations (High Fidelity, Great Expectations, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), who directed it (the script was written by Ronald Harwood, whose works as a screenwriter includes films like Oliver Twist, Being Julia, and The Pianist) had apprehensions about doing justice to the novel, and he turned out to be right. The $50 million film, shot in Cartagena, was a let-down and Márquez was hurt by the lousy treatment of his work.

He always maintained that One Hundred Years of Solitude — a part of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s — was “written against the cinema, in the sense that it sets out to show that literature has a much vaster scope, much greater possibilities for reaching people than the cinema.” Márquez had been fascinated by films since his childhood days in Aracataca in the Caribbean region of northern Colombia, where he spent nine formative years with his grandparents. His grandfather, Colonle Nicolás Márquez, would often take him to Olympia movie theatre, where they would watch films like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Colombia’s turn-of-the-century civil war instilled a sense of harsh realism in Márquez. In 1961, when he moved to Mexico City as a 34-year-old, along with his wife and two-year-old Rodrigo, he wanted to become a screenwriter “to reach the multitudes” even though he had studied law (he could not complete his studies as his college was shut during the war).

As it turned out, Márquez remained associated with cinema all his life — as a film critic, a screenwriter, and, much later, as a director of a film school. “There was a time when the cinema interested me much more than the novel. I believed it was a means of expression that made it possible to go much further than with literature,” he said in an interview. Between 1965 and 1967, he dedicated himself to writing a story that he had been struggling to finish for more than a decade. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude — how it came to be written is steeped in many myths, including one in which the first sentence came to him as an epiphany when he was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children, and he became so possessed by the urge to complete the novel that he shut himself off the world even as he fell behind rent for several months and his family suffered till he emerged from his isolation with the final manuscript — was his little act of rebellion since he had failed to convince several filmmakers of its cinematic possibility. “At the time I was bitterly disappointed. I felt so out of place in the film world that I began writing One Hundred Years of Solitude….. I can guarantee that practically all the stories contained in the novel have passed over the desks of film producers, who rejected them saying they were unrealistic and wouldn’t appeal to people,” he had asserted.

Macondo: A poetic transposition of the history of Latin America

As a journalist, Márquez wrote about a host of whimsical pieces, including contemplations on Greta Garbo’s feet and the craft of Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Rita Hayworth and William Faulkner, whose imaginary Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha became a forerunner of Macondo. In his writings on cinema, Márquez admitted to his deep appreciation of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Miracle in Milan (1951). The blend of neo-realism and fantasy in these films influenced Márquez when he was working on his epochal novel. He also drew on the works of other writers of the Boom, including Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. Though One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely seen as the founding work of magical realism, it’s not correct.

For Márquez also greatly benefited from the works of other Modernist masters (besides Faulkner), including Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Other influences included Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Alejo Carpentier. What’s true though is that it was Márquez who made magic realism a rollicking genre in its own right. Writers around the world emulated him: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (Chile), Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales (France), Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips (China),Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (India), Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (Australia) and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Japan), and another Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved (America).

One Hundred Years of Solitude is primarily a Caribbean story. “Everything I wrote are experiences drawn from the peoples of Latin America; they are truths, they are blindingly obvious . . . and thus my novel may seem like a poetic transposition of the history of Latin America,” Márquez said once. However, Macondo could also be a small town anywhere in the Third World; in fact, it eventually became a symbol of any small community at the mercy of historical forces beyond its ken and control.

The Buendía family migrated from the desertic Guajira to a place like Aracataca sometime in the 19th century. José Arcadio Buendía, who had killed his best friend — out of honour and machismo — was forced to leave because he was haunted by his friend’s ghost. He founded Macondo where he and his wife Ursula built a house and became the unofficial representatives of the new community. They went on to have three children — Arcadio, Aureliano and Amaranta — and also took in a number of others over the years. One of the household servants, Pilar Ternera, had relationships with several male members of the family down the years, and the incestuous coupling produced a child with a pig’s tail, which put an unceremonious stop to the family line.

Macondo was visited by all sorts of people. Besides gypsies, there were other outsiders or gringos, including political and military representatives. When North Americans arrived with their Fruit Company to transform the town’s economy and culture, the locals rebelled by going on strike. The central government was prodded into action and thousands of striking workers, along with their family members, were massacred beside the railway station in Macondo. This dark episode cast an ominous shadow on Macondo; it slid  into decline, which was signalled by Ursula’s death. For some years, the younger generation lived — more as victims of history than as creators of myth — in a state of primordial darkness and sinfulness. But when Aureliano (II), the son of Meme and Mauricio Babilonia, and the last member of the family, fathered a child with a pig’s tail after a wild affair with his youthful aunt, Macondo was swept away in an apocalyptic hurricane wind.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the series has been shot entirely in Spanish; Marquéz’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, who decided to publish his last lost novel (Until August, which was released recently) are the executive producers. Márquez had feared that audiences would reject a series in Spanish, but things are hardly the same as they were, say a decade ago (Marquéz died in 2014 at the age of 87). The golden age of series has not only overshadowed feature films, cinephiles around the globe have also become more accepting of Spanish-language productions, having relished, for instance, the gritty gangster drama series Narcos (about Colombia’s infamously violent and powerful drug cartels), or the Academy-Award winning film, Roma, or Disney’s Encanto, which became mainstream fares. As we wait for the series to release, here is hoping that it is as sprawling and spectacular and beautiful as the novel. And nothing is lost in execution.