Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, to create the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel.
The streaming company announced on Wednesday that the book will be adapted into a Spanish-language series and filmed largely in the Nobel prize-winning author’s home country of Colombia. García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, will serve as executive producers, The Guardian reported.
García Márquez’s sons did not allow their father’s book to be adapted easily. García said that his father was skeptical of how the novel’s more magical elements would translate to a traditional film structure and that he wanted it to be told in Spanish.
“For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to One Hundred Years of Solitude because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice,” García said. “But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better.”
The colorful tale details the lineage of the Buendía family dynasty founders of the rural and isolated town of Macondo, and their dabbles in alchemy and religious apparitions. The novel has aspects of history and magical realism that make it one of the most celebrated Latin American novels of the 20th century. It has sold an estimated 47 million copies and been translated into 46 languages.
García Márquez won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982. He died in 2014.
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