‘One Hundred Years of Solitude – Part 1’ Netflix Review: A Faithful Adaptation Without a Soul of Its Own

Respectful to the core, faithful to the words written by Gabriel García Márquez—every comma, every description—One Hundred Years of Solitude is more an audiovisual transcription of the novel than a work with an identity of its own. Perhaps, for the millions of readers and fans of this foundational text of Latin American literature, the creative team’s decision behind the adaptation is the most logical and appropriate. They may well be right, since there is no way of knowing how a freer, less literal version might have worked. Still, as it stands, it may be an accessible and competent series that fulfills the function of not ruining the text for future generations, but it will be difficult to regard it as a separate artistic production with a life of its own. It will likely stand as a worthy companion, an ad hoc piece, a lavish anecdote for a book that will continue building its mythology beyond its existence.

Recreating a world like the one García Márquez imagined for Macondo and its surroundings is no easy task—that recognizable yet impossible universe in which the 1967 novel unfolds. And Netflix has poured millions upon millions into doing so, to the point of constructing an entire town from scratch, much like the original inhabitants of the place did, who laid down their bones in that territory after a long pilgrimage toward an uncertain destination—albeit in much less time. The Macondo of the novel grows, develops, collapses, and rebuilds itself over time—across decades and generations, through illnesses and wars, improbable lives and unthinkable deaths, alchemy, and that mysterious force we call magical realism, which moves the bones of the dead, creates a “drizzle of tiny yellow flowers,” or allows the living to negotiate with ghosts. A century that is also all centuries.

The eight episodes released cover the first half of the novel—essentially the first two generations of the Buendía family, before the Aurelianos and the Arcadios require numbers to tell them apart. Everything begins with the famous forbidden marriage between cousins Úrsula (Susana Morales and later Marleyda Soto) and José Arcadio (Marco Antonio González and later Diego Vásquez), rejected and challenged by their community—a union that sparked debates about the man’s virility and fear of the superstition of “the child with a pig’s tail” that might result from such inbreeding. Yet the couple’s children would be, at least in that sense, fully human, with all their limbs and features in the proper place.

The series follows the trajectory of this first half of the book, beginning with the decision to establish Macondo, the city’s early growth, the arrival of the gypsies, of the alchemist Melquíades Ochoa (Moreno Borja), the connection to the outside world enabled by Úrsula’s travels, and—in its early episodes—focusing on José Arcadio’s scientific and pseudoscientific obsessions. He abandons the care of his children and the development of his town in pursuit of revelations that allow him to declare that “the Earth is round like an orange,” among other discoveries in a world that seems newly invented.

This idea of Macondo as an invention outside time and space (“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention them one had to point”) underpins what follows: the lives of the couple’s children—the biological, the adopted, and those who are neither one nor the other—all with their distinct personalities, romances, breakups, conflicts, mysterious disappearances, and strange habits. It begins with the intense José Arcadio (Leonardo Soto and Edgar Vittorino), continues with the initially quieter and more timid Aureliano (Santiago Vásquez and Claudio Cataño), the dark Amaranta (Loren Sofía Paz), and the adoptive and eccentric Rebeca (Laura Grueso), to whom must be added Arcadio (Janer Villareal), raised as a son though not exactly one (though the novel is nearly sixty years old, I will avoid spoilers).

Each of the events the novel describes around them appears represented in the series: weddings fulfilled and thwarted, “illegitimate” children and tragic confrontations, obsessions, discoveries, fulfilled prophecies, and later political conflicts and civil wars between parties. Over time, Macondo becomes a more traditional place, with problems similar to those of other towns and cities in Colombia—particularly those tied to the arrival of organized religion and ruling elites—but with that unique quality that allows, from time to time, events to exceed the bounds of reason and scientific logic. Not every town has a stubborn trail of blood that travels hundreds of meters on its own to announce a death.

Each episode corresponds, with some exceptions and minor alterations, to a chapter of the novel. They are generally structured around a voiceover that quotes García Márquez’s prose verbatim, introducing each episode or striking moment—a wind, an arrival at the house, a “plague,” a death, and so on—that shapes the lives of the Buendía family and the increasingly chaotic and populated Macondo, which was once a village where no one was over thirty and no one had died. The voice is followed by the events themselves, which are usually respectful audiovisual translations of the novel, often converting narrative passages into dialogue between characters.

The fidelity is beyond reproach, but it is limited by the creators’ imagination and by what that visualization can or cannot add to the world readers built in their minds. There are long and elaborate tracking shots showcasing the production values, some poetic moments in the early episodes handled with ingenuity and special effects, and the sense is that both Alex García López and Laura Mora—who direct five and three episodes, respectively—approach their work with the seriousness and professionalism of those walking on nails, careful not to misstep, aware of the enormous risks involved. Without such caution, adapting a novel like this could easily descend into the ridiculous—something that, fortunately, never happens.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, despite an occasionally bombastic tone and some overly emphatic characterizations from its uneven cast, does not lose its bearings. Like Macondo’s first inhabitants, it strives to bring its effort and sacrifice safely to harbor, to arrive at its destination with dignity and without major losses. It is a journey that, like that of those pilgrims, will never reach the sea, but will settle in a place that suits it, where it can survive. The objective is achieved—but not much more than that. Rather than an act of artistic creation, it feels like a large group of people setting out to solve a problem—the supposed unfilmability of García Márquez’s novel—and managing to emerge relatively unscathed.

Many of the novel’s themes and some of its emblematic figures remain, in several ways, tied to the era in which it was written. Yet in other respects, they feel relevant and unresolved, particularly what One Hundred Years of Solitude has to say about the clash between science and magic, tradition and modernity (or conservatives and liberals), sanity and madness, and the sprawling, turbulent family bonds that lead the Buendías to turn a curse into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fear of solitude and death, after all, is often the uncontrollable origin of everything—the unsettling tremor that moves the world, lifts it to paroxysm, and later destroys it, turning it into “a terrifying whirlwind of dust and debris.”