“Lo que importa en la vida no es lo que te sucede, sino lo que recuerdas y cómo lo recuerdas.”
– Gabriel García Márquez
At the Hay Festival Segovia 2024 in September, I enjoyed exploring an exhibition of photographs from One Hundred Years of Solitude ahead of its official Netflix release in December. Later, at the cloister of IE University, I sat in on a dialogue with its two scriptwriters, Natalia Santa, and Camila Brugés, alongside Lourdes Fernández Bencosme, a professor at the IE School of Humanities. The discussion, moderated by María Jesús Espinosa de los Monteros, general director of PRISA Audio, delved into the intricate process of adapting García Márquez’s literary masterpiece for the screen.
I first read the book five years ago—during the COVID-19 lockdown, an event that now feels like a lifetime away. Even then, Márquez’s storytelling held an unshakable intrigue, and the announcement of a Netflix adaptation rekindled my fascination. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel-winning fiction, One Hundred Years of Solitude, he tells the story of a fictional town, Macondo, founded by Aureliano Buendia in pursuit of a new life. The story goes on to explore many superstitions native to Colombia: the unsettling aftermath of death and its accompanying loneliness, the weight of family curses and ongoing political conflict, the haunting presence of the dead, and the rituals of life, midnight, and weddings. At the other end, the intricacies and depths of love, despair, and grief, the evolution of primordial societies and religion, scientific discoveries and how they shaped ways of life, men’s search for a world beyond his limit and own habitation, and at the core, colonialism and its imposing claws on ordinary people, uneasily disrupting their ways of life, and men’s innate desire to revolt and live in freedom.
What makes Márquez’s work truly enduring is its universality and his use of magical surrealism, tangent with surrealism – giving us a deeper perspective into the human imagination and a metaphysical yearning for a world beyond our domain, along with other writers such as Haruki Murakami, Salma Rushdie, etc. Márquez’s motifs—cultural displacement, generational trauma, and the search for identity—are central themes in literature across continents but invoke one spirit. They echo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child, both grappling with the ruptures of colonialism and the erosion of indigenous traditions. Achebe’s novel, often regarded as the most influential work in African literature, has been translated into over 60 languages. It is a postcolonial critique of Western imperialism and its impact on cultural identity. Inspired by Achebe’s work, Weep Not, Child follows a similar path, chronicling Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising through the eyes of a young boy caught between resistance and survival. The same motifs resonate in Khaled Hosseini’s works but from a post-modernist perspective —The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed—which explore the geopolitical turmoil of Afghanistan and its devastating effects on families and communities. In Sea Prayer, Hosseini captures the loss and longing of exile:
“…First came the protests.
Then, the siege.
The skies spitting bombs.
Starvation.
Burials…
These are things you know…”
Across cultures, histories, and generations, literature preserves, reimagines, and bears witness to the struggles of ordinary people. Marquez’s brought to life, to remembrance, and to light the folklores of Columbia first debuted in his novella Leaf Storm, the forerunner to what Forbes calls his Magnus Opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’s ability to transform what should be ordinary midnight stories and folktales into profound language embedded with rich literature and context is perhaps the most noble aim of writers, artists, or storytellers: to make more of what is already there and take it to a level higher above the ordinary human’s plane. And as we read, remember, and retell these stories, we, too, become part of the eternal cycle of storytelling. This cycle ensures no history, struggle, or solitude is ever truly forgotten.
