Adapting <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> Sounded Impossible. It Wasn’t.

In his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez turned a century-long history lesson into a mesmerizing read. His prose is rhythmic and rambling. He spins tales both mundane and magical. And as he delves into the fantastical lives of the Buendía family, who founded the mythical town of Macondo, García Márquez displays a transcendent ability to bend time. Take the book’s masterful opening line, for example: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Up until his death, in 2014, García Márquez claimed that the book was impossible to commit to film. One Hundred Years of Solitude, he said, “is written against the cinema”—which is why, following its publication in 1967, the author repeatedly rejected attempts to purchase the rights. An avid cinephile and screenwriter himself, he’d signed off on prior adaptations of his work, such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera, but neither fared well with critics. He insisted that the scope and voice of his most famous book would work on-screen only if it were told in Spanish over the course of 100 hours—or, according to other reports, a full 100 years.

[Read: How One Hundred Years of Solitude became a classic]

Netflix’s 16-episode take, the first half of which is now streaming, isn’t 100 hours long, but it is a superb translation anyway—as haunting and wondrous as García Márquez’s readers would hope for it to be. Filmed in Colombia and told in Spanish as García Márquez wished, the show has the blessing of the author’s sons, who serve as executive producers. Book purists may not find these efforts enough to convince them of the production’s legitimacy. But its endeavor to faithfully render the novel, including by recruiting Latin American directors and an almost totally local cast, have led to what may be the best execution of a so-called “unadaptable” novel yet. Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude matches García Márquez’s raw ambition. Watching it feels like watching a gorgeous, strange, enchanting dream.

That’s fitting, because Macondo is a dream—a place José Arcadio Buendía (played by Marco González), the family’s patriarch, envisions one night as he sleeps. When the series begins, José Arcadio, a man prone to forming obsessions, has just married his cousin, the pragmatic Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales). Their family grows, and so does the town they establish in the middle of a swamp. The Buendía home plays host to many curious characters and events over the years: There’s a man who swings by regularly with quirky inventions, a dirt-eating girl who carries around a bag of her parents’ quivering bones, and refugees fleeing a civil war that breeds in one man a “resistance to nostalgia.”

The Netflix version tweaks the chronology slightly, telling the Buendías’ saga more linearly; added dialogue helps place the viewer within the sweeping timeline. (Although the novel covers five generations of Buendías, many of them named after one another, the show has just begun introducing the third generation by the end of its first half.) Yet it’s as affecting to watch the various family members—who grow up and die, flourish and suffer, fall in love (often with one another), and repeat their forebears’ mistakes—as it is to read about them. Their peculiar stories illustrate how history tends to repeat itself because memory is fallible. The opposing forces of idealism and practicality, Solitude makes clear, play essential roles in shaping not just families, but entire civilizations.

Book-to-screen adaptations can struggle under television’s conventions, such as casting actors and adhering to an episodic structure with individual, complete arcs. The finest attempts understand that overcoming those limits isn’t the goal; instead, they aim to conjure what reading the novel is like. A series based on a heady sci-fi novel can illustrate concepts with astounding effects. An interpretation of an introspective relationship drama can use poignant looks to make your heart ache. A depiction of a robust historical epic can transform thrilling accounts into epic set pieces. In that sense, even the most idiosyncratic story can work in the medium, as long as the rendition mirrors its source material’s emotional impact.

Netflix’s Solitude succeeds because it conveys the same sense of revelation the book does. The camerawork re-creates the novel’s playful approach to time, often gliding through Macondo while entire years pass in seconds. The richly detailed production design makes the town feel simultaneously real and dreamlike: The cast wander around large sets, wearing period costumes that subtly change in color and textile through the decades; doors sometimes open of their own accord, and pieces of furniture move as if guided by an invisible hand. At one point, the score even includes, as my subtitles put it, “ethereal vocalizing.” These techniques don’t come off as extravagant, however—just flourishes that emphasize the original story’s half-remembered quality.

Most impressive is how the series visually captures García Márquez’s style of “magical realism.” The author considered surreality innate to life in Latin America, where metaphors and myths frequently drive storytelling. Numerous moments embody this worldview: In one episode, every inhabitant of Macondo finally falls asleep after suffering an “insomnia plague,” toppling over to create a river of slumbering bodies in the streets. When a young girl begins menstruating, she’s seen reclining in a bathtub in the middle of a jungle as a pool of blood blossoms in the water. One of the most gorgeous tableaus consists of a man tied to a chestnut tree in a courtyard, sitting silently in a downpour as sunlight filters through the leaves and raindrops. Such shots reproduce García Márquez’s knack for wedding the ordinary to the extraordinary, and turning prosaic developments into enduring fables. And when the author’s figurative language—say, the way he describes how a character “felt his bones filling up with foam”—seems too outlandish to portray, the show offers it as narration instead.

[Read: The most unadaptable book in fiction]

But there’s only so much a TV adaptation can do to emulate the text’s delirious energy. Several scenes made me reach for my copy of the book, just to remind myself of how García Márquez’s prose ignited my imagination instead. Recounting José Arcadio’s search for gold with his followers as they explore the land around Macondo the author wrote: “For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.” The series offers merely brief glimpses of his crew wandering the jungle, looking exhausted by their endeavor.

Still, what Netflix’s Solitude has done, mostly for the better, is reject making a literal translation of the book in favor of an evocative one. I found myself as captivated by the Buendías on-screen, their story now enlivened by the beautiful world surrounding them, as I had been when I first encountered them on the page. “Writing is a hypnotic act,” García Márquez once said. By harnessing the passion behind the author’s words, Netflix’s Solitude creates a spellbinding effect of its own.

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