"We find the images that have been in readers’ heads for more than half a century"about the adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude

How is a novel adapted to television whose characters, who are almost a country’s heritage, have the faces that each of its readers puts on it?

This challenge, imposed by the author of the work himself, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, was the main challenge that the producers had behind the adaptation of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the masterpieces of modern Spanish, to the television.

Well this Wednesday, after several years of work, viewers – many of them readers of the novel – will face this version produced by the streaming giant Netflix, with the premiere of the series of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

This television version has been an expensive production that included not only the creation of a physical version of the mythical town of Macondo – built in a corner in the south of Colombia – but a difficult process of creating the best adaptation of a story that is in the collective not only of Colombians, but of Latin America (the novel has sold close to a million copies on the continent alone).

That was the fear of García Marquez himself, who for more than 50 years had refused to give up the rights to the novel for a simple reason: “I prefer that my readers continue imagining my characters,” he said in a radio interview in 1991.

But, after his death in 2014, that idea changed.

And that precept seemed to apply exclusively to One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Buendía saga, because many of their works were made into films while García Marquez was living, such as “The Colonel Has No One to Write to Him” ​​(1999), “Memories of My Whores” Sad” (2011), “Love in the Time of Cholera” (2007) and the stories “In this town there are no thieves” (1965) and “The Widow of Montiel”, among others.

“Our goal was to show a very real, Colombian family, to whom magical things happen. And around that, immerse viewers in a universe where they felt like they were in Macondo,” Laura Mora, one of the directors of the series.

So, starting this Wednesday, you can enjoy eight episodes lasting one hour each (there will be a second season with another eight episodes) where the offspring of the Buendías will be shown.

In April 2014 the world learned of the death of Gabriel García Marquez in Mexico. A new stage then began to know what his legacy would look like.

Then, in 2018, the news broke: that two of the writer’s sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, announced that the rights to his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, had been sold to Netflix for an adaptation.

In 1987, García Marquez had hinted that although he did not see that the novel could be adapted for film, he did believe that a multi-chapter series could be a viable option.

“The first thing we were clear about in the adaptation process is that literature and television are two very different languages ​​and that trying to do something better than what was already in the novel was being arrogant,” says Mora.

“And there were very big challenges, for example in the novel there are very few dialogues and we had to do a lot of work to see how these characters spoke, how they communicated with each other,” he adds.

Then the foundations were laid with a basic precept: production had to be Colombian and be from Colombia.

According to several local media, Netflix invested nearly US$50 million to launch the project, which included the construction of an entire town to recreate Macondo.

In addition, an exhaustive investigation of the customs and ways in which people lived in Colombia during the 19th and early 20th centuries was carried out to achieve a recreation as close as possible to the reality of what García Marquez narrates in his book.

But the main challenge remained there: the faces of the main characters, what was Colonel Aureliano Buendía going to look like? What was Úrsula Iguarán going to look like?

“It is very difficult to compete with our own imagination. With the Buendías that each one has in their heads. So what we did was do a very rigorous job in the casting and we also went all over Colombia looking for new talents,” says Mora.

So after several months of searching, the main characters were in the hands of a combination of experienced actors and new revelations.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía, in his adult stage, was left in the hands of Claudio Cataño, from Bogotá. Marleyda Soto Ríos, from Cali, as Úrsula Iguarán, Diego Vasquez from Ibagué is the patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, among others.

“I think that that bet we made, to respect the novel and be fair, allowed us to get actors who do give a life, a materiality and a soul to those characters. And I think that is one of the great achievements of the series “Mora adds.

But it is not only about adapting the saga of a Colombian (or Latin American) family but also that the book is full of special events such as the levitation of the priest or the shower of yellow flowers when José Arcadio Buendía dies.

“The choice was not to do it with the artifices of special effects, but in a much more material, more real way. That’s why we did the levitation of the priest with the help of cables – which we later removed with a computer – but so close to what that was narrated in the book,” says the director.

“The shower of flowers was also with real flowers and others made of plastic. The idea was to be as artisanal as possible when recreating these scenes,” he adds.

So after more than two years of production – which continues with the recording of the second season – Macondo and the Buendía saga came to life and the reactions have not been long in coming.

For example, one of García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo – who is a film director and executive producer of the series – noted that “Gabo would be watching the series without a doubt.”

“It is a different experience and you have to try to appreciate it for what it is, not constantly comparing the book; for me they are little brother projects that complement each other,” he said during the premiere of the series this Monday in Bogotá.

Critics have also received in a similar way what the first eight chapters of the Netflix production propose.

“We find the images that have been in the readers’ heads for more than half a century: the rain of yellow flowers that announces the death of José Arcadio and the thread of blood that snakes through the town until it reaches the feet of Úrsula to tell him that his son is dead, are surprisingly beautiful,” wrote film critic Jack Seale in the British newspaper The Guardian.

“There are enough twisted wonders in this series to make Macondo worth revisiting,” he adds.

But others have not been as enthusiastic about the adaptation.

The Colombian writer Carolina Sanín noted in her X account:

“Watching the series, if you have not read the book, does stunt the possibility of reading the book later in a deep, rich and complex way. It narrows it, diminishes it, determines it. So it is not true that it ‘brings closer’ to anyone. to the book. It drives them away,” he said.

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