Netflix’s new adaptation of this beloved book is pretty much perfect ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel, weaves superstition, sex and the surreal into an unparallelled Spanish-language epic.
Márquez paints this world with such vivid, visceral strokes that, years after reading his novel, it stayed seared into my imagination: Rebeca shovelling handfuls of dirt into her mouth; mad José Arcadio tied to a chestnut tree and muttering in Latin; a naked Remedios the Beauty painting animals on the walls with her own excrement.
Set in the make-believe Colombian town of Macondo from the early 1800s onwards, the book charts how a streak of endless civil wars, freak climate events and imperialist plantation owners shape this geographically nebulous corner of Latin America for over a century.
It’s a complex series of warped, bizarre and at times grotesque tales, propelled by deep-rooted, unshakeable desires and the doomed characters’ inability to escape their fate – a kind of intergenerational curse that passes from parents to children (including, more often than not, the proclivity to copulate with their own relatives).
Helen Coffey assesses whether a new Netflix show can possibly do justice to the original.
