The label has proven impossible to dodge. “I write realism,” the novelist Guadalupe Nettel tells me on the phone from Mexico City. One of her short stories is about a family that eats insects to reverse a curse, so reviewers refer to her work as magical realism. “But I write it as realism,” she says. “In Mexico, we have these customs. Still, in the US, they call ‘magical realism’ whatever they can’t label.”
García Márquez’s near-mythical ascent from a nobody born in a remote Colombian town to the world’s most widely read Spanish-language writer is filled with all kinds of lore. Some of the mythmaking was instigated by Gabo himself: He had a mischievous desire to inflate his own story as if it were one of his fictions. As he wrote in a wry note to Fuentes: “I was no savior when it came to Mexican film. But I do believe I can be of much help in our efforts to bring Latin American novels to the world.”
With its lavish two-part 16-episode adaptation, Netflix hopes to introduce new audiences to the saga of the seven generations of the doomed Buendía family and their eccentric, wild, passionate, corrupt, innocent, voluble, incestuous, beautiful, sad, and often mad lives in Macondo.
It’s a momentous (and risky) endeavor. I ask Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s VP of Latin American content and godfather of the project, if One Hundred Years will be a tropical version of two other hit series centered around families, Game of Thrones and The Crown. “Well,” he tells me via video call from Mexico City without missing a beat, “the Buendías are certainly more fun than the Windsors.” The raw material is all there. As García Márquez knew so well, the hard part lies in the execution.
Gabo always loved film. His eldest son, Rodrigo García Barcha, himself a writer-director of films, recalls his father’s love for Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and Alain Resnais’s Providence, to name a few. He also loved Sam Peckinpah and had a soft spot for the Italian neorealists. García Barcha remembers that when he was in his early teens, his parents took him to see Last Tango in Paris and The Story of Adele H.
By the ’70s, after Gabo had become relatively wealthy, he spent a lot of time and money on the moving image. He was involved in TV production in Colombia, wrote scripts, and helped set up a film school in Cuba, where he gave screenwriting workshops. Fernando Restrepo, his partner in the Colombian venture, once told me that Gabo tried to set up a film production company that he planned to call Solitude & Company, which I later borrowed for the title of an oral history I wrote about his life.
Two of his most beloved works—Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera—have been turned into movies, but neither did the novels justice. The former, directed by Francesco Rosi, played like a misguided Italian operetta. The latter, directed by Mike Newell, was cartoonish and overdramatized and starred non-Colombian actors who spoke in English in the lead roles. “Truly awful,” López-Calvo says by email of many of the adaptations, adding that he thinks the small screen will suit the novel well. “A TV series seems ideal today for such a complex and sophisticated work. And television series have changed dramatically in recent years…. Perhaps Gabo would’ve been okay with it today, who knows!”
The 1967 first edition of Márquez’s masterwork, published by Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires.
López-Calvo is referring to the fact that Gabo never wanted his most famous book to be made into a film, preferring readers to imagine the characters for themselves. He said it would take 100 hours to tell the story properly, and that the only way he could even begin to conceive of an acceptable adaptation was if it were in Spanish and shot in Colombia.
But in truth, Gabo said many things, and often they were purposefully contradictory. He loved hanging out with Hollywood stars—he visited Robert Redford at the Sundance Institute, and Francis Ford Coppola once cooked pasta at his house in Havana—even as he declined to sell the rights to his masterwork to luminaries including William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, and Dino De Laurentis. There is, however, an obscure Japanese adaptation from 1981. Shortly after Gabo’s death in 2014, I asked his agent, the legendary Carmen Balcells, if there would ever be a true and full adaptation of the novel. Her answer was absolute: “He never wanted a film made of One Hundred Years. And even today it’s a desire respected by his family—which I think will be upheld forever.” His children have a different recollection of their father’s wishes. “He was always a little tempted to make the books into movies,” says García Barcha, but “he said no so many times that the offers disappeared.”