A couple of years later, as he sat down to watch One Hundred Years of Solitude Part 2, Kyle Barratt was to remember that distant afternoon he googled a release date and discovered the season had only just entered production.
I was worried about Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude before it aired. Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece is my favourite novel. I love it dearly, and the grand story has been called unfilmable, including by the author himself, who prevented film adaptations. The streaming service delivered an adaptation of Pedro Páramo recently, a novel which had enormous influence on One Hundred Years of Solitude and its magic realism, and I thought it was a disappointing effort. I didn’t have my hopes up for the series adaptation of my favourite book, composed of two seasons/parts of eight episodes each.
The first part of One Hundred Years of Solitude blew my expectations out of the water. It’s a tremendous adaptation. I watched the first episode when the season released in December and savoured the following seven episodes, spacing them out over a month to relish the richness of them. The writing, direction, and performances are wonderful. As with the novel, it’s a microcosmic view of Columbian history but so much broader than just that: it’s life, with all its light and darkness and magic. It’s a joy to get an in-depth adaptation, translating the majority of the novel to the screen. I wonder how it works for people who haven’t read the book; it does feel like it demands prior investment to fully enjoy it. But ultimately I don’t care, I love the series.
This new form of the story even made me appreciate some aspects of the novel more than I did on the page. Arcadio was never one of my favourite characters in the book, he didn’t stand out to me as much as his family members, yet I thought he was the star of the season. I’m eager to reread the novel with a new perspective on him. I thought the series did Amaranta well, who might be my favourite character in the book, as weird as that sounds. At least, she’s the one I find most interesting, rejecting all opportunities for happiness, using solitude like self-harm, and I’m desperate to see her story continue in the second season covering the back half of the novel.
The magic realism was executed well in the show. The one change, or rather omission, I didn’t like was the lack of gunpower smell when José Arcadio mysteriously died, lacking any wound. In the book, the smell is most pungent and never leaves his body, even years after death. My interpretation of his demise was always that the bullet he saved Aureliano from came for him, supernaturally, as some kind of cosmic balance. The show removes some evidence for this theory, but it’s a small nitpick. Also not included are the strangers who leave gold in the Buendía home, which is hidden on the property and plays a key role later. Maybe the writers will wait until the second part to introduce that plot point.
Since finishing the first part I’ve been frequently googling for information about the release date for the second. I was sure I read somewhere that while the novel had been split in two, it was all filmed together. That the second part would follow not long after the first, like Netflix often does with its shows. Squid Game season 3 was filmed back-to-back with the second season and is releasing in just a few months. I was certain One Hundred Years of Solitude was the same. Someone on Reddit told me so; it must be true.
Imagine my horror when I googled the release date recently and saw that the second season, or part, has only just entered production. You mean it hasn’t already been made?! If it follows the same timeframe and process as the first season, that’s over six months of shooting and over a year of post-production. Part 1 was December 2024 and now it seems likely the second part will be December 2026. Forget waiting one hundred years, two is torture enough.
At least the writers picked the right place to split the story. The novel features seven generations of the Buendía family, flowing from one to the other, but the book does feel like two distinct sections, with two ‘halves’ of the family paralleling each other. Colonel Aureliano Buendía will continue to play a key role but much focus will now be on the new, younger Aureliano and José Arcadio and how they differ from their namesakes. I get the feeling that the first half of the book and those characters are more beloved but I love the second half, too.
To fit the rest of the novel into eight more episodes, the remainder will have to be condensed a little more, which is understandable and easier to do than the first half. Curiously, the show started at the end, the snake eating its tail narratively, and we know the ruin the story is driving to. I was initially unsure of this change, the final reveal being turned into a framing device, but I like that it gives a reason for the narration. The more of Márquez’s words that can be directly lifted into the show the better.
So, how do I pass these unexpected two years until the conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude? In truth, most shows now have such long waits. For example, I’m currently enjoying the second season of Severance almost three years after the first. But what makes this different is that I had fooled myself into thinking the second season of One Hundred Years of Solitude was already complete. Now the long wait feels so much harsher. I’ll watch the first season again and any I’ll take any excuse to read the book again, especially now that I might picture it differently, having the show and its actors in my mind. All I can hope for is that the wait won’t lead to me being tied to a tree, cursing my broken time machine.
