Can a series get bigger than this?

A still from the Netflix adaptation of Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Besides directly dabbling in film productions, the great writer, Gabriel García Marquez (1927-2014), was also once a prominent film critic.

It's odd then that while alive, he was clear about one thing. That no filmmaker must lay their hands on his greatest book, One Hundred Years of Solitude (OHYS).

Why's that, you think, I ask Colombian screenwriters Camila Bruges and Natalia Santa. Natalia says, "Well, you can't make a 10-hour movie! And it's impossible to fit all that happens in the book, into a film any shorter."

Who are Camila and Natalia? Quite easily, writers with the toughest job in Colombia, if not Latin America, or even the world, perhaps; given the "global gaze" on them.

They've gone ahead and adapted Marquez's OHYS for a 16-hour Netflix series. The first season of which dropped on December 11. And it's a stellar piece of work on its own, no doubt; equally faithful to Marquez's OG magnum opus.

Natalia reasons, "If Gabo (Marquez) had lived to the moment we are right now - with technical advancements, plus streaming platforms - his opinion on filming OHYS would've been different."

Screenwriters Natalia Santa and Camila Bruges

To begin with, she says, all that Marquez's family demanded from Netflix, before parting with book rights - which would have also been the author's concerns - were impossible to meet, even until 2014.

The conditions being: "OHYS has to be in Spanish, shot in Colombia, primarily with a local crew, and production values of the highest/global level." Now, movies have budgets. Execution is the filmmakers' headache.

Unlike the spirited imagination of a fiction writer, let alone Marquez, who practically captured the history of his continent, through characters - starting with Jose Arcadio Buendía, founder of the mythical state of Macondo - that were both believable and not, straddling between fantasy and memoir, or magic and realism, as it were.

While adapting, Camila and Natalia tell me, they faced the opposite of a problem. For the scale of Colombian television, they're inherently attuned to cutting costs, when placing situations on script.

"Over here, we were told to think huger, huger; think big," Camila smiles, about her unlearning process.

Incidentally, Camila's father was from exactly the same north Colombian region as Marquez. She says, "My grandfather, like Gabo, was a journalist. He died early. He was also a photographer. When you see those images, you're struck by how they look straight out of OHYS."

Another aspect that Camila's grandfather passed on as family heirloom was magic realism - "[stories reflecting] their strong indigenous/native traditions, dealing with ideas of life after death, mythical tales, [diving into] the Colombian-Caribbean culture of the paranormal and fantastical, that Marquez did in his books. OHYS is still anthropological, archaeological, looking at our culture, history, with such sharp gaze."

Magic realism is embedded in folk tales of these parts. Which, I guess, explains why it's so common as a genre/style in Latin American literature. They get it from grandparents. Marquez self-admittedly did, from his grandmom.

Precisely, what is magic realism, and how is it separate from pure fantasy, say, the likes of The Lord of the Rings?

My rudimentary sense is that with pure fantasy, or even sci-fi, realism is employed merely as excuse for you to connect with story/characters, and escape into an altogether another world.

Magic realism kinda does the opposite. The mythical parts show up into what's seemingly so life-like - just to let you know that it isn't simply life, as we know it. You join the dots/metaphors, still. The intention isn't pure escape.

There's also, of course, surrealism that's just totally trippy visuals, which art-house cinema has a strong tradition of (Buñuel, Dali, etc).

For reasons above, magic realism could get tricky in a mainstream movie. Coming across as self-indulgent being the perennial concern on screen.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for instance - a book that I'm convinced would not have emerged, if Marquez didn't - made for a crappy movie.

This could also be, because it didn't have the breathing space of a series. Yann Martel's Life of Pi, on the other hand, is a masterpiece, as an Ang Lee film.

Frankly, I haven't watched anything like OHYS as a series - that feels so much like stepping into a pulsating novel, and slipping out of it, when you pause/sleep, and go right back in, once you rewind a bit, and restart.

What Camila and Natalia have cracked with their screenplay is sticking so suitably to Marquez's words and world.

Also, oh, yes. Admit it. You have not read OHYS! But assume the other person has, and who hasn't either. Everybody knows this title from the world's best-known Colombian, after Pablo Escobar (Narcos).

Let this be our li'l secret then. Watch the series, and pretend it's also your favourite book! Now, lemme get back to the show, as you might, even if to feel joyously informed first.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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