Magical Thinking

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ's One Hundred Years of Solitude has never been faithfully adapted for the screen partly because he wouldn't allow it in his lifetime. With a Netflix series now in the works, VF tracks the long journey of a masterpiece

- SILVANA PATERNOSTRO

ONE EVENING IN June 1965, a tired Gabriel García Márquez returned to his hotel after a full day as a screenwriter on the set of a film outside of Mexico City. A young couple was waiting to speak with him.

Gabo, as he's commonly known in Latin America, was then in his late 30s and had published four books, but his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a few years away. He had been mulling over the premise for a long time, and his confidence in the novel was unshakable.

He had told his younger brother, Gustavo, that he would one day write a book that would be read more than Don Quixote, and after his wedding he told his wife, Mercedes, not to worry about money because at 40, he would publish a novel the entire world would know. He did.

Now, 57 years after its publication, Netflix is making the first true adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude for a series due later this year. “The García Márquez fund is very healthy,” says Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House in Spain. But back in 1965, Gabo was still an impoverished writer, even if well-regarded among Latin American bibliophiles. He was living in Mexico City with his wife and two young sons. He was a chain-smoking transplant from the Colombian Caribbean who earned a living writing copy for an advertising agency (which he hated doing), with the occasional screenwriting gig (which he much preferred). As the two strangers asking to interview him were about to discover, his ability to tell a captivating tale was already in full force in those drudging days.