'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

“Writing is a hypnotic act.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As it's the first week of the Christmas holidays, I've been diving into a series I've been anticipating for a while. I've also been re-reading some of the reviews and the genesis of this adaptation of a book that Garcia-Marquez himself felt was unadaptable. He said that any film of the book would need to be a hundred years long to do it justice...

It's the Netflix adaptation of the classic 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' - a masterpiece.

It tells the story of the Buendia family over five generations. It is dense and magical and powerful in its description of the growth of Macondo, a town which is founded by the Buendias and others, and slowly gets drawn into the politics of the country in a story as complicated as the family tree.

I'm four hours in, and so far it's doing a good job of capturing the myriad storylines and set piece moments.

Vanity Fair piece goes into detail on the production of the series.

A full set of Macondo was built, and the camera swirls around it from the start.

Macondo was built near Ibagué, a town in the Andes. It’s far from the Caribbean, but it has a similar mountainous topography to the area around Aracataca, where the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta cascade into the sea. Eugenio Caballero (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Bárbara Enríquez (Roma) have designed the sets, so Macondo-in-the-Andes promises to be gorgeous. On set, as in the novel, Macondo transforms from a settlement of straw-roofed huts for 20 families into a full-blown town. It’s all been built in human scale.

Marquez lived in a town called Aracataca in Colombia