2024-04-20 04:01:02
Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been made into a film for the first time since it was published in 1967. According to him, a sixteen-part TV series was created, which will be presented by the Netflix video library. She released the first trailer from it this Wednesday evening, when ten years have passed since Márquez’s death.
The series One Hundred Years of Solitude will premiere on Netflix this year. | Video: Netflix
As AFP reminds, this prose is still the best-known contribution to the genre called magical realism. So far, it has sold around 50 million copies worldwide, and it has been translated into 46 languages, including Czech.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the saga of the Buendí family from the fictional village of Macondo in the South American jungle. Critics describe the book as a parable about loneliness, love or death. It mixes reality with magic, and supernatural phenomena are a common part of life here. “In the mythical town of Macondo, the Buendí family struggles with a curse, madness and unfulfilled love,” reads the annotation of the new Netflix adaptation.
Videotek announced it in 2019, the crew filmed in Márquez’s native Colombia. The series will premiere this year, the exact date has not yet been announced by Netflix.
In the first trailer, the voice of Aureliano Babilonia is heard reading from the parchments of the gypsy magician Melquíades. The video begins with the famous first sentence of the book, in which Colonel Aureliano Buendía, standing before the firing squad, recalls “that distant afternoon when his father took him to the gypsies to see the ice”. The colonel is played by Claudio Cataño. The following scenes focus on the patriarch of the House of José Arcadia Buendía and his wife Úrsula, who leave their village and trudge across the mountains, where Úrsula gives birth, until they finally choose the freshest spot on the shore, order the trees to be cut down, and establish a village in the clearing, which they call Macondo . However, the saga of the family really only begins there.
Gabriel García Márquez repeatedly refused offers to film his most famous work. It was only after his death that his sons Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha gave permission. Both are executive producers of the series.
“For decades, our father did not want to sell the rights because he was afraid that the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude could not fit on the screen of a feature film and because he did not want it to be filmed in a language other than Spanish,” the sons explained, explaining why they nodded to Netflix’s offer, which instead a two-hour film in English produced a sixteen-part series in Spanish.
The main creators of the series are Colombian director Laura Mora and Argentinian director Alex Garcia Lopez. “One Hundred Years of Solitude will be one of the most ambitious Latin American productions of all time,” promises Netflix.
The new novel will premiere not long after Márquez’s last novel, Uvidíme se v August, was also published posthumously in Czech.
Gabriel García Márquez used to be referred to as the main representative of the boom in Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s. His other books such as Autumn of the Patriarch or The General in his Labyrinth are also famous.
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for novels and short stories in which he “combines fantasy and reality into a richly structured world of imagination, mirroring the life and conflicts of the continent”. Most recently, he published the novel In Memory of My Sad Curses.