Like many fans of “100 Years of Solitude,” I’d have thought Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s 1967 novel was unfilmable. Over the last several weeks, I was proved dead wrong.
With the blessings of the Marquez family, Netflix has produced a 16-episode series that does a highly creditable, sometimes extraordinary and occasionally tedious job of capturing the trials and tribulations of the Buendia family of coastal Colombia.
Never read the novel, or forgotten what it’s about? Allow me to Aug-splain: Jose Arcadio Buendia (Marco Antonio González Ospina), a humble young man in mid-19th-century Colombia, kills a man in a duel. To get a fresh start, he decides to leave town with his bride Ursula (Susana Morales Canas) who is his first cousin.
Joined by several dozen like-minded villagers, Jose Arcadio establishes a new community hundreds of miles to the West, near the Pacific Ocean. They call it Macond
o, which soon becomes a utopia of sorts, where everyone works together for the common good, all living in solitude from the rest of the world.
Pure solitude was not to be, however. The town is soon visited by a band of gypsies led by Malquiades (Moreno Borja), a holy man who impresses the intellectually curious Jose Arcadio with his knowledge of science, alchemy and the burgeoning field of photography.
The citizens of Macondo are also visited—more like invaded—by representatives of the government of the newly independent Colombia. Apolonaire Moscote (Jairo Camargo), a conservative weakling, is appointed, without any consultations with the citizens of Macondo, as its leader. His first order is to paint all the houses blue. The arrival of the military and the Catholic church soon follow, both of which are anathema to the secular Buendia family.
A rigged election takes place between the Conservative and Liberal parties (i.e., the original founders of Macondo), the outcome of which leads to a long and somewhat absurd war based on Colombia’s “1000-Day War,” which lasted from 1899-1902. Violence ensues from both left and right—“this is war,” as someone points out—but the underlying message is clear: power corrupts, no matter which party holds the reins of power.
Apart from the politics, “100 Years’” far more interestingly focuses on the activities of the Buendia family. Please be advised: the nomenclature of the characters can get rather confusing—in the novel, the name “José Arcadio" appears four times in the family tree, "Aureliano" appears 22 times, "Remedios" appears three times and "Amaranta" and "Ursula" appear 14 times! By attaching a face to each of the names, the series clears up this confusion somewhat.
Any other significant similarities between the series and the novel? The book for many remains the quintessential example of “magical realism,” a genre described by one critic as when the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The series captures this concept surprisingly well. Ghosts appear and disappear. Priests are levitated into the air. A shower of petals rains over a funeral procession. The cinematography by Paulo Pérez and María Sarasvati makes this even more magical.
Claudio Catano as Jose Arcadio’s revolutionary son Aureliano and Maryleda Soto as Ursula (in her mature years) lead a fantastic ensemble of Colombian actors, only 30 percent of whom are professionals. Another standout is the adult Jose Arcadio (Diego Vasquez) who loses both his mind and power of speech late in life due to an untimely death of a friend.
Kudos to directors Alex Garcia Lopez Pérez and Laura Mota, and to the production design team of Eugenio Caballero and Bárbara Enríquez for a series that faithfully and often quite lovingly follows the narrative of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. Props too to Netflix which had the foresight to spread the series out over two seasons, thereby giving us aficionados something to look forward to in late 2026. Hasta luego.
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I too liked the series. It’s obvious that many millions of dollars were invested in the production, nearly all of it filmed in Colombia. My memory of the novel is lost in the mists of time since I probably read it forty years ago. I will give it another look, this time in the original Spanish.