During his lifetime, the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, arguably the greatest ever Spanish-language writer, considered One Hundred Years of Solitude, his 1967 magnum opus, to be unfilmable. “The novel, unlike film,” he told an interviewer in the 1980s, “leaves the reader room for creativity, allowing them to imagine the characters, settings, and situations as they see them.” But after his death in 2014, his estate moved quickly to license the book for a lavish Netflix series, the second half of which arrives today ahead of a feature-length finale at the end of the month.
A fragile peace has fallen on Macondo, the settlement founded by the Buendia family’s dead patriarch, José Arcadio, yet Colonel Aureliano Buendia (Claudio Cataño) remains a feared enemy of the conservative Colombian state. While he mopes around the family home, the twins, Aureliano Segundo (Julián Román) and José Arcadio Segundo (Emmanuel Suaza), drive the Buendia dynasty forward. Aureliano marries the beautiful, aristocratic Fernanda (Laura Taylor) and slips into a loveless but fecund union. José Arcadio, meanwhile, is the driving force of innovation in Macondo. He conspires to build a railroad that will connect the town with the outside world, bringing prosperity in the form of a rapacious banana company. “Surely our sacrifices will bear fruit?” muses Aureliano. But soon enough, his father’s dream begins to rot on the branch, and Macondo is subjected to the savage violence of modernity.
