Marcel Proust’s brother once said it would take an extended stay in hospital to actually read his sibling’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu.
It’s going to take the Christmas holidays to watch Netflix’s 16-part adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s supposedly unfilmable One Hundred Years of Solitude. But it will be worth it.
From the wedding of José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales) through their founding of the isolated and unfeasibly troubled settlement Macondo to the arrival of war and the railroad, the series follows the generational epic with surprising accuracy and suitably warped wonder.
Superstition, sex, surrealism, savagery, struggle and the weaving together of fantasy with science are all pulled off with breathtaking skill in this Spanish language version. Subtitles or voice over? The former is more faithful, but the latter is far easier…
