Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel is not one to take lightly. Not just a classic but a totem of at least one genre, standing as it does as a high point of magical realism and Spanish-language literature in general, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a big, big book. Netflix is evidently keen not to undercook its dramatisation, made in the novel’s home of Colombia: at 16 episodes, it’s a pretty big TV series.
Márquez’s masterwork is by no means an unfilmable novel, taking place largely in one location and, as it moves through several generations of the same family, telling its story in episodic fashion. Against that is the difficulty of rendering images that were planted in one’s imagination by Márquez’s prose. Devotees of the book might think the pictures on the screen can never measure up, while those sceptical about magical realism – One Hundred Years of Solitude is a work cursed by its own influence, its innovations now cheapened by too many imitators – will be primed to dismiss it as ephemeral, twee or, in its riskier moments, distasteful.
