Netflix can’t steal Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s thunder

The Buendía men are creatures of lust and instinct, not governed by any taboo. Jose Arcadio, the patriarch, marries his cousin Ursula, their elder son marries his adopted sister Rebeca, the younger son falls for Remedios, an underage girl, and later marries her. Ursula’s best friend Pilar gives birth to two of the Buendía grandsons, one of whom tries to sleep with her, unaware that she is his biological mother, and the other attempts to seduce his aunt Amaranta. In both cases, thankfully, the men are jilted, and incest is narrowly averted.

Also read: Manu Gandhi's diaries shine a light on Gandhi's deepest struggles

It’s one thing to imagine all this orgy being enacted in Garcia Marquez’s dulcet prose—soaring to poetic heights one moment, droll and deadpan the next. But to see it all play out on screen, by flesh and blood characters is quite another. Especially since Garcia Marquez had vehemently opposed every proposal to turn his book into a movie during his lifetime.

Critic Ariel Dorfman remembered hearing an unequivocal no in 1974, when Gabo, as Garcia Marquez was lovingly called by friends and admirers, was asked by Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha, if he would ever allow such a project.

In an article for the online platform Literary Hub published last month, Dorfman recalled Gabo’s reaction: “‘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.’" Gabo ended his impassioned outburst with the words, “Ni muerto!"—over my dead body. That dire pronouncement, alas, has come to pass since his death in 2014.

Last year, his family published Until August, an unfinished novella he had urged them to destroy. In that instance, though, the decision was well-received. Almost every reader and critic loved the book, even though Gabo, who was suffering from dementia when he wrote it, had worried about its quality.

So even though moves like these may seem questionable, posthumous publications have given us some of the greatest works of literature—almost all of Franz Kafka’s body of writing would have been unknown to the world if not for his close friend and literary executor Max Brod’s decision to disregard Kafka’s injunction to burn all his papers. Screen adaptations, however, are another matter.

By giving another creator the right to envision a writer’s work, you effectively relinquish the right of the deceased writer to protect the sanctity of their imagination. Loyal readers, who have cherished putting faces to the names of the characters in their mind’s eye, are suddenly confronted with flesh and blood people who represent them. The illusion of exclusivity, whether in the mind of the writer or reader, is shattered—a double tragedy. So, now it’s difficult to see Colonel Aureliano Buendía as anyone other than the Colombian actor, Claudio Cataño.

All this isn’t to dismiss the exquisite craft and respect with which the TV adaptation has been conceptualised by directors Alex García López and Laura Mora. The entire series was shot in Colombia and in Spanish in accordance with Gabo’s wishes, if such a screen adaptation were to ever happen. With each episode running for roughly an hour, the length of the series does justice to the writer’s demand for it to take its own sweet time and not be scrunched into a couple of hours for the benefit of cinema-goers. If nothing else, you have to give credit to the stellar cinematography by Paulo Pérez and María Sarasvati. The journey Jose Arcadio Buendía and his tribe undertake through the swamps to reach Macondo is one of the most arresting sequences in any TV series for sure.

But visual triumph, conveying the sense of danger and adventure, is just one part of the appeal of the story. As Dorfman put it, “the novel is above all a feat of language."

It’s Gabo’s storyteller’s voice that holds the reader in a spell from start to finish. Columbian writer Carolina Sanin called him the “Latin American Homer." As she said, he “wrote an epic about the birth and rebirth of civilisation, written from the other side of the world." Although the series conveys this sense of wonder, it fails to capture the breathless pace of storytelling that readers associate with the book, which is somewhat tragic as Gabo’s loquaciousness, even in his daily life, was the stuff of legends.

In 1965, two years before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, when writers Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann went to interview Gabo, they were spellbound by the writer’s life story as told to them by the man himself. When they read the novel in 1967, they realised the writer had essentially told them the whole story of the book in the course of that meeting—all of it had lived inside his mind, roiling and gestating for years on end.

Even more curiously, although “magic realism" has become the buzzword associated with One Hundred Years of Solitude since its publication—in fact, with all of Garcia Marquez’s oeuvre—the truth is that he spent years collecting information and lore from family and friends that eventually got distilled into the pages of his masterpiece.

Also read: Quit on new year goals? It’s okay

“All my books are journalistic books, even if not many people see them as such," Gabo once said. “But these books involve a ton of research, checking of data, historical strictness, and dedication to the facts, which in essence makes them fictionalised or fantasized works of reportage."

It was Garcia Marquez’s unique gift that empowered him to transform hard reality into the stuff of dreams—and erase the boundary that divide the two in the process. One of the most powerful sections of One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the onset and spread of the insomnia plague, which, in the screen version is ably portrayed as a period of terror, chaos and mayhem. But the on-screen visuals, Dorfman reminds us again, come nowhere close to the subtle menace of Gabo’s masterful description: “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."

Even the most gifted filmmaker in the world, equipped with the best tech and special effects, cannot capture that chilling sense of the uncanny packed into one tremendous sentence.

Rereadings is a monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times.