The series, which will be released this week, adapts the novel for the screen for the first time. Even the author didn’t think it was possible.
By Annie Correal. Photography by Federico Rios. In the NYT.
The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.
The idyllic town in Colombia was the imaginary setting for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 novel that helped Gabriel García Márquez win the Nobel Prize and that, over the years, led to many offers from Hollywood to create an adaptation.
The author always refused, insisting that his novel, in which the real and fantastical converge, could never be rendered onscreen. His Macondo, he said, could never be built.
But now, in a rambling field outside the city of Ibagué, stands Macondo. Built by Netflix from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel, the town has real birds nesting in its trees and dogs wandering its narrow streets.
García Márquez did not want Hollywood to make a movie from his book, his son Rodrigo García said, because he could not picture English-speaking actors playing the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. Nor could he see the epic story being squeezed into two hours — or three, or four, for that matter.
And then there was the issue of magical realism, which the author used to conjure his experience of Latin America’s capricious, stranger-than-fiction reality.
In the novel, which opens in the 19th century, the people of Macondo marvel at things already considered ordinary elsewhere: a daguerreotype machine, magnets, ice. But no one questions the presence of a ghost — or whether a baby can be born with the tail of a pig or flowers fall like rain from the sky.
Onscreen, magical realism has proved notoriously hard to replicate: The visual effects used to create such images in the past tipped at times into fantasy or horror, or just looked silly. The 2007 film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s other best-known book, was a box-office flop.
But in the decade since García Márquez died, much has changed and, in a turn he could not have imagined, Netflix has been able to overcome his old objections. (continued)