Netflix’s Spanish mini-series ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is as good as it can get in terms of adapting a great (but difficult) novel into cinematic form

The makers do not try to duplicate the prose, and the situations are not exoticised. The lovely words are complemented by lovely, unfussy imagery that makes us feel the magical realism. The magic appears as casual, as inevitable as the realism. 

Arundhati Roy said she would never sell the rights for a film adaptation of her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things. This was her explanation: “Every reader has a vision of the novel in his or her head and I do not want it to be fashioned into one film. A lot of Hollywood producers approached me, but I do not want to sell the adaptation rights for any amount of money. I do not want the novel to be colonised by one imagination.” What a beautiful thought that is: that the vast and varied independence of a novel should not be colonised by one imagination. After all, the interiority of the novel is fundamentally at odds with the exteriority of cinema. The images in our heads as we read prose are half-formed – we see the people, the places, and yet we don’t. A playful form of malleability is at work here, and it vanishes the minute we see an actor in the part, or we see the setting, so vulgar in its finality. Our capacity to participate in the proceedings is diminished.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galattaplus.com/netflixs-spanish-mini-series-one-hundred-years-of-solitude-is-as-good-as-it-can-get-in-terms-of-adapting-a-great-but-difficult-novel-into-cinematic-form/

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