Four episodes into Netflix’s new adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m still reeling. Partly at the hugely ambitious, lavishly filmed series itself – but mainly at the fact that it ever got made in the first place.
A sprawling masterclass in magic realism, the 1967 novel spans seven generations of the fictional Buendía family, weaving together sex, superstition, and the downright surreal. It’s a complex series of warped, bizarre and at times grotesque tales, propelled by deep-rooted, unshakeable desires and the doomed characters’ inability to escape their fate – a kind of intergenerational curse that passes from parents to children (including, more often than not, the proclivity to copulate with their own relatives).
