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Culture | From the shelf to the couch

Does great literature translate into great television?

Netflix hopes so, with its adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

IT WOULD BE hard, Gabriel García Márquez thought, to do justice to the surreal, sprawling tale on screen. By his reckoning, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, his landmark novel of 1967, would need a runtime of 100 hours; it would also have to be filmed in Colombia, entirely in Spanish.

Netflix, with the support of Márquez’s estate, has honoured two of those three proclamations. The streamer boasts that its new adaptation of Márquez’s novel—the first on screen—is “one of the most ambitious productions in Latin American history”. (“Ambitious” is also a synonym for “expensive”: Netflix will not reveal the budget but claims it is the largest ever for a production in the region.) But keeping in mind how much solitude viewers actually want, it has opted to compress Márquez’s novel into 16 episodes, with the first tranche released on December 11th.

The book presents a formidable challenge to film-makers for two reasons. One is its status: many think “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was the greatest novel of the 20th century. It helped Márquez to win the Nobel prize in literature in 1982 and has sold some 50m copies worldwide. With affection comes expectation. When the TV show was announced, fans online were quick to express their fears about an oversimplified, “caricatured” retelling.

Those remarks point to the other test for adaptors, which is the novel’s sheer complexity. Set in around 1850-1950, the book traces the fortunes of the Buendía family across several generations, from the time José Arcadio and his wife, Úrsula, establish the town of Macondo to the moment their last descendant dies, with civil war, modernisation, economic prosperity and ruin in between.

Time, in this tale, is a “turning wheel” that yields “unavoidable repetitions”. Male scions are all called some combination of José, Arcadio or Aureliano. (Readers everywhere are grateful to whoever thought to include a family tree at the front of the book.) There are more unusual occurrences, too. Characters die, only to return as ghosts. One man is permanently surrounded by a kaleidoscope of yellow butterflies; another cracks his head open, leaking not blood but an “amber-coloured oil that was impregnated with that secret perfume”.

On the page this magical realism, as Márquez’s style came to be known, can be entrancing. The risk is that it could look oddly unconvincing on screen. When Netflix approached Alex García López, a director, about the project, he was excited but apprehensive. “I remember the book having very little dialogue. I remember it being a very existential kind of book and jumping all over the place. I just thought: ‘This is just not really doable, is it?’”

It was. José Rivera, one of the screenwriters, decided that the story should proceed chronologically and that it needed a narrator. It quotes from the novel verbatim. “It was a great way of having Gabo’s voice guide us through the story,” Mr Lopez says, and a way to be “faithful to the book…to its execution, to its style”.

As a result, the film-makers have captured the strangeness of the story, in which events are at once fantastical and mundane. They have also retained its sensuality. At times this makes for uneasy viewing: the novel recounts several incidents of incest and one of paedophilia. “We do not want to rewrite history,” asserts Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s vice president of Latin American content: “That’s the way things happened.” In fact, keeping in Aureliano’s wooing of Remedios, a nine-year-old girl, makes the tale more timely. Only last month Colombia passed legislation prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from getting married.

To write “One Hundred Years of Solitude” Márquez drew on his childhood town of Aracataca. The novel “couldn’t be more specific and more grounded…in a very specific part of a huge, huge country,” Mr Ramos says, but “because of the way he tells the story it has global resonance”. Almost 60 years later, Netflix is hoping this is true of its version. Márquez’s book, after all, is about history repeating itself.

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