Marquez on web, finally

Shardul Bhardwaj

Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The streaming giant has announced that the Spanish novel will be produced as a Spanish language web-series. The project is at a very nascent stage. The Netflix’ move is seen by many as a similar event as to the release of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.  The novel had paved the way for world readership to take notice of the vast array of literature that Latin America had produced and was going to produce.

Marquez’ two sons will be the executive producers. During his lifetime, the writer had refused to give the rights to film producers because he felt that it was virtually impossible to adapt the novel on to the screen under the time constraints of a feature film. Marquez’ sons feel that the current age of online streaming where world audiences have been accepting of Spanish language episodic series like Narcos might be the right time for their father’s magnum opus to be adapted for the screen. Netflix has emphasised on the fact that it would set the episodic in Colombia with mostly Latin American artists working on it. Netflix has long been on an acquisition spree. Netflix is following in line with old American big corporation way of monopolising a trade by signing and incubating some of the costliest projects today.

For many, the film Roma by Alphonoso Cuaron was an unexpected offering by Netflix. The film’s meditative pace is something that one hardly sees in most films picked up by Netflix. The streaming platform mostly works on the Hollywood standard of things, which is formulaic. It would be interesting to see how Netflix would tackle a book which is revered for talking of alchemy, rain of yellow flowers, and sea of marsh, etc. as if it were something as conventionally real as precipitation. The book which follows the Buendia Dynasty, founders of rural town of Macondo, has so many layers and sub plots intertwined with each other that any traditional Hollywood rationalisation might impact negatively on the creation. The previous adaptations of Marquez novels have suffered a similar fate e.g. Love in time of Cholera (2007) by Mike Newell.

The plot structure generally recognisable to a Netflix audience is heavily influenced by the Hollywood way of cause and effect. Generally each occurrence or character actions seem to always have a rational explanation hidden somewhere in the film or the series. This cause and effect has been the result of western rationalisation effort emanating from various empiricist schools of thought.

Marquez in his Noble Prize acceptance speech remarked, “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serve only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free and ever more solitary.”

The hope is that at this opportune moment, this acquisition by Netflix will serve to be new chapter in ways to visualise rather than a repetition of all the things one has seen by Hollywood. There could have been no better a book to usher in the dialectics of the real and unreal, known and unknown, explained and unexplained than this phenomenal piece of literature by one of the finest writers of the 20th century.