Netflix can't steal the master's thunder

A monthly column on backlisted books that have much to offer in contemporary times

- Somak Ghoshal

I finally bit the bullet and watched One Hundred Years of Solitude, which dropped on Netflix in December. Based on the Colombian master Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel, the series is divided into two parts, eight episodes each. The second part is due later this year.

I first read the book one summer vacation as a teenager, and a prissy one if I say so myself, ears turning red at the raunchiness with which the members of the Buendía family indulge their sexual appetite. No other classic in my memory has as much sex on its pages—consensual or otherwise—with both the men and the women consumed by it.

The Buendía men are creatures of lust and instinct, not governed by any taboo. Jose Arcadio, the patriarch, marries his cousin Ursula, their elder son marries his adopted sister Rebeca, the younger son falls for Remedios, an underage girl, and later marries her. Ursula's best friend Pilar gives birth to two of the Buendía grandsons, one of whom tries to sleep with her, unaware that she is his biological mother, and the other attempts to seduce his aunt Amaranta. In both cases, thankfully, the men are jilted, and incest is narrowly averted.

It's one thing to imagine all this orgy being enacted in Garcia Marquez's dulcet prose—soaring to poetic heights one moment, droll and deadpan the next. But to see it all play out on screen, by flesh and blood characters is quite another. Especially since Garcia Marquez had vehemently opposed every proposal to turn his book into a movie during his lifetime.

Critic Ariel Dorfman remembered hearing an unequivocal no in 1974, when Gabo, as Garcia Marquez was lovingly called by friends and admirers, was asked by Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha, if he would ever allow such a project.