What Would Gabriel García Márquez Have Thought of the Netflix Version of His Novel?

It was in a trattoria on the Piazza Navona in early April of 1974 that for the first but not the last time I heard Gabriel García Márquez refuse to even contemplate turning his masterpiece, Cien Aňos de Soledad, into a film.

Gabo—as his friends called him—was in Rome as one of the vice-presidents of the Second Russell Tribunal convened to denounce human rights violations in Latin America, so the conversation that evening was basically political. But towards the end, a question was broached by the illustrious Brazilian director, Glauber Rocha. Everyone else at the table went quiet—it was a star-studded gathering, the Argentine author Julio Cortázar, the legendary Chilean artist Roberto Matta, the exiled Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and his white-haired wife, María Teresa León, who had sworn at some point during the evening that she would enter Madrid on a white horse, totally naked, as soon as Franco died.

None of us expected the vehement reaction of the Colombian novelist, usually so soft-spoken. “Never!” Gabo exclaimed. “To synthesize that story of seven generations of Buendías, the whole history of my country and all of Latin America, really of humanity, impossible. Only the gringos have the resources for that sort of film. I’ve already received offers: they propose an epic, two hours, three hours long. And in English! Imagine Charlton Heston pretending he’s an unknown, mythical Colombian in a fake jungle.” And added a definitive, “Ni muerto!”

Which could be translated as “Over my dead body” but better rendered as “Not even after I’m dead!”

As we walked towards the hotel where we were lodged, I probed further. As an accomplished screenwriter himself, couldn’t he control the production, demand that the characters speak Spanish.

He shook his head. “It would be a travesty,” he said. “What is most entrancing in the book cannot be translated into another medium. People keep forgetting that it’s very…. literary.” And repeated: “Ni muerto!”

Well, my friend Gabo, alas, is quite muerto, irretrievably so, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is streaming on Netflix to glowing reviews. A number of his initial concerns have been brilliantly addressed: entirely filmed in Spanish on location in Colombia, with a majority of primarily anonymous, amateur actors and a praiseworthy to the text. Viewers are guided through a complicated genealogy, expertly unscrolling the intersections of time and history. The delirious cinematography, the superb casting, the respectful script, the fabulous locations, create some unforgettable, exquisite scenes, as if they had sprung directly from the entrails of Gabo’s wild and tender imagination.

García Márquez was an enthusiast of joyful intercourse, a way both out of loneliness and, eventually, a realization of how lonely each of us really is.

And yet, for anyone who has read the novel—as I have, some six or seven times, since I was first enchanted by it in 1967, one of its initial readers thanks to my job as literary critic for Ercilla, Chile’s premier newsmagazine, something essential is missing.

If Gabo’s novel were only his sprawling plot and fascinating incidents, the Netflix series could be hailed as a lavish triumph. But the novel is above all a feat of language. Like all truly revolutionary works of art, it contained, from its first iconic line, a singular strategy for conveying the world being deployed, one that would change the course of world literature.

It is that unique outlook which has been lost.

Only to focus on one of the most intriguing, heraldic incidents in the novel. To the remote village of Macondo, founded by the Buendías and their friends as a paradise where death holds no sway, comes the Plague of Insomnia, its ravages anticipating, one realizes later, the apocalyptic destiny of the town and its inhabitants. By keeping its victims perpetually awake it divests them of memories and individuality. Among the many descriptions of the pestilence’s symptoms, there is this jewel: “In that state of lucid hallucination, they did not only see the images of their own dreams but could see the images dreamt by others.” A fantastic vision that’s not included in the Netflix epic (indeed, how could something like that be filmed concisely, without interrupting the narrative flow?)

Instead we are afforded the plague-as-spectacle events, culminating in havoc and violence in the night, illuminated by a magnificent forest of torches burning spectrally. Everything is spooky and cryptic, from the onset of the epidemic, when adopted daughter Rebecca shows signs of having contracted the affliction. A moment discretely described in the novel: “her eyes lit up like those of a cat in the dark.” The filmmakers have transformed those feline eyes into a terrifying milky blue, an image that comes from the typical horror-film, visual shorthand for possession by demons.

I would not bring up what might be deemed a trivial matter if it were not indicative of the treatment in the adaptation of what is mysterious and often, erroneously in my view, termed “magical.” Not a secondary issue, as one of the signal aesthetic achievements of the novel is that the ordinary and the supernatural are incessantly and comfortably juxtaposed, a plague of insomnia recounted as matter-of-factly as the planting of a tree or a child sucking her thumb. The Buendías are not puzzled when ghosts visit them, when Aureliano can foretell the future, when a dying spinster takes letters from the town’s inhabitants to their deceased relatives. What is strange and unbelievable to those who dwell in Macondo, are the inventions of science that transmute the material world: ice, photography, compasses, intrusions from modernity into a world that, up till then, lived in a state of perpetual childlike innocence.

Gabo was able to convey this vision because he adopted the perspective of the community he embedded us in, told the story from their belief-system, as real to them as their own bodies. To signal, as the Netflix adaptation does, that something unnatural is afoot by strumming ominous music and consigning most of the paranormal episodes to a gloomy, darkened atmosphere, creates exactly the opposite effect that the novel accomplishes so amazingly. The adaptation turns us into voyeurs of the eccentric and the uncanny, comforted by familiar tropes, instead of challenging us to ask, as the book does: what exactly is reality?

Gabo was able to convey this vision because he adopted the perspective of the community he embedded us in, told the story from their belief-system, as real to them as their own bodies.

Something similar happens with sex. García Márquez was an enthusiast of joyful intercourse, a way both out of loneliness and, eventually, a realization of how lonely each of us really is, how even that momentary wonder of joined bodies cannot defeat the death we face, each on his, on her, own. Nothing could be farthest from that enigmatic, inward approach to sex than the proliferation on screen of steamy scenes of copulation, with standardized groans, heaving bodies and tiresome orgasms destined more to drive up ratings than to accompany the characters in their quest to defy extinction.

Nor could one glean, from the Netflix series, that One Hundred Years is, well, so … literary, indebted to Kafka and Borges, Faulkner and Rabelais, the Decameron and the Arabian Knights, how deeply it is the grandchild of Cervantes. Nor can spectators of this adaptation deduce that, despite the incest, murder, civil wars, massacres, imperialism, that beset the Buendía clan and the greater colonized continent that they allegorically represent, the original novel is relentlessly comical. Gabo’s characters are obstinately entrenched in their obsessions and folly, staggering, often laughably, towards the scaffold of themselves and history, a view that is absent from this solemn cinematic version. Perhaps, most crucially, there is no sense that what we are watching is subversive, contesting story-telling itself, what it truly means to have been born far from the centers of power.

Just recently, I defended in the New York Review of Books the decision by the sons and heirs of García Márquez to release, against his express wishes, his posthumous novel, Until August. I am less indulgent this time. Would their father find much to admire in this adaptation? Undoubtedly, yes. Certainly, not a travesty. He would be pleased that his beloved, flawed Buendías have been afforded such dignity. And additional millions will be drawn to this extraordinary gift from the troubled, defiant zones of our humanity. I just have to trust that the seminal vision contained in that book will shine through and not be trapped forever in the dazzling but limited version now pervading screens all across the globe.

This essay first appeared on LitHub.

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