"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento...."
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered that long-ago afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
That is arguably the most iconic opening line in Latin American literature — from the novel Cien Años de Soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the late Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.
So it's not surprising that it's the first utterance you hear at the start of Netflix's new adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which began streaming this week — and which marks the first time the renowned magical realist epic has been rendered onscreen.
That makes the 16-part series a landmark event, given that One Hundred Years of Solitude was published 57 years ago — and that its universal acclaim ranks right alongside giants like Don Quixote and The Bible.
Perhaps because of its depth, grandeur and complexity, García Márquez always feared Hollywood couldn’t do justice to the work. But after he died a decade ago, his family decided Netflix's platform could.
Netflix wasn't about to ignore the call to sponsor a historic project like that. And true to García Márquez's wishes, it was filmed and produced in Colombia, by Colombians, in Spanish (with English subtitles).
“My brother and my mother and I discussed the fact that, you know, it should be tried," says García Márquez's son, Rodrigo García who is a series executive producer.
"I mean, it’s going to be made sooner or later — eventually it would be in the public domain. And working with Netflix, with all the resources necessary, just, everything came together.”
READ MORE: Gabo and Gringos: Did magical realism bridge or divide the Americas?
From the looks of the first episodes, things did come together. It’s a strong, captivating production, as lush and earthy as the novel itself feels.
But García Márquez fans know that more than just the success of a series is at stake. The other big question is: will it make a 21st-century generation that’s more into Netflix than novels want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as watch it?
"This world created by García Márquez, when you read it, you are amazed," says Jaime Abello, executive director of the Gabo Foundation — named after García Márquez’s nickname — in Cartagena, Colombia.
Abello points out this adaptation does matter more than most because critics worldwide recognize One Hundred Years of Solitude as nothing less than the War and Peace of the global south.
The six-generation, love-and-war saga of the Buendía family is told in a style, known as magical realism, that blends sensual reality with dreamlike fantasy — like the moment the impossibly beautiful character Remedios floats up to the sky and disappears; or when it rains yellow flowers for almost five years, or an endless train passes carrying massacre victims.
The gypsy character Melquíades, portrayed by Gino Montesinos, signals that supernatural air early in the series when he announces that everything in the world has its own life — "it's just a matter of waking up their souls" — and then introduces the Buendías and their young, remote village to the "miracle" of magnets.
Meanwhile, that fictional town of Macondo becomes a microcosm of Latin America’s chronic cycle of hope and tragedy, including a civil war that eerily resembles the half-century-long conflict that started in Colombia shortly before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967.
“This production is a landmark moment for the storytelling and legacy of Gabriel García Márquez — especially in the post-literate world we are becoming."Jaime Abello
“It has deep roots in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Colombia," says Abello. "But at the same time, it’s universal.
"For instance, in China, in Japan, in India, it’s the foreign novel with the most readership.”
García Márquez understood and admired the power of film — he in fact wrote screenplays himself.
But when I had the opportunity to interview him in 1996, he told me, perhaps half-jokingly, that he wouldn’t know how to adapt the rich and ardent humanity of One Hundred Years of Solitude to film.
Abello believes the Netflix adaptation would change his mind if he were still around.
“This production is a landmark moment for the storytelling and legacy of Gabriel García Márquez — especially in the post-literate world we are becoming," Abello says. "So I hope many feel invited to go to the original book.”
Tough, wise women
The series' Colombian actors admit they felt the weight of the legendary novel on the set.
Marleyda Soto, who portrays the older version of the central character Ursula, the Buendía family matriarch, told WLRN that in the end she simply did what García Márquez did when he created Ursula: draw on the stories of the tough and wise Colombian women she grew up listening to.
“I found that doing justice to Ursula’s character really meant doing justice to all the women of my family — because they’re Ursula, too,” Soto says.
That makes it all the more gratifying, she adds, that most of the series' writers — and one of its main directors, Laura Mora — are women.
“During all the terrible civil conflicts in Colombia that One Hundred Years of Solutide alludes to,” Soto says, “it’s women who’ve kept the country moving forward.”
Claudio Cataño, who plays Ursula's son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, says it was also a challenge "to convey his life and the life of so many in our history that follow an arc between opposite poles — from the silent and almost timid, to armed revolutionary — to that moment when politics grabs and devours a person and he says, 'I have nothing left to lose.'"
García Márquez was often criticized for his friendship with Latin America's most famous revolutionary, Cuba's late communist dictator Fidel Castro. While he acknowledged Castro's excesses, García Márquez insisted he was the continent's strongest defender against U.S. interventionism, which is also a theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Actor Diego Vásquez says it was a bittersweet experience handling the role of Ursula's dreamer husband, José Arcadio Buendía, and his faith in human re-invention in a new world.
"The character I have to incarnate is that heroic but innocent idealist who dreams of building a unique place in the world but sees the effort fail ... failure that's represented in that metaphor image in the novel of a snake eating its own tail."
Many Colombians in South Florida are hailing the Netflix series, too. Mariel Anderson, an education nonprofit executive in Miami, grew up in Cali, Colombia, reading García Márquez — and wanted her daughters to know the One Hundred Years of Solitude narrative.
“You hope the movie will bring a lot of attention to a wonderful literary work," Anderson says, "and convey to them all those magic stories you heard as a Colombian.”
The last line of the novel says that generations “condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
Netflix has 16 episodes — 16 opportunities — to make García Márquez’s masterpiece come alive for a new generation.
READ MORE: Gabriel García Márquez's last novel is published against his wishes
