I want to be Colonel Aureliano Buendia all over again. I want to smell Macondo all over again.

I also want to be Ursula and I want to be Arcadio.

In the three decades-plus since I first read “A Hundred Years of Solitude” life has been lived. The smell of Macondo somehow stayed from the nostrils to the crevices of the brain. The brain is home to the mind.

It was tough to imagine that all that is read will be rendered into movie. The limitation of the moving camera in telling a story is that it demands a hero. Or a heroine. At the the very least, a protagonist. Even if she is the anti- hero.

In the reading of the book, any good book, the music of the language rings in the mind’s ears. When I read The Hundred Years for the first time it never struck me that Colonel Aureliano Buendia would come across as a hero. That is where the rendering fails. A human is human with his or her flaws. He is the protagonist, yes. He or she is still within the idea of the beautiful.

The beauty of Marquez is in his journalism. The Hundred Years of Solitude is not the first Marquez book I read. The first was “The story of a shipwrecked sailor”.

I understood much later that Marquez had his takes from The Hundred Years that he spun off into other stories and essays. “Innocent Erendira”, for example.

And the most I have quoted is his lecture on journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. “Don’t fake it. Live it”.

When Netflix announced that it was rendering the hundred years into a series I was surprised. It is so difficult to imagine that it can be rendered into audio-visual commercial imagery.

The backstory helps of course. Marquez himself did not want it to be rendered into a movie. Because a movie does not do justice to the idea of the story. With its fragrances and armpit smells.

He said that before the Internet and movie streaming evolved to what it has today. When the rights were sold by his
progeny, we are told, it was on the condition that the crew and cast will be Colombian.

In the way we live now the spread of The Hundred Years is captured in 20 hours with its loves, heartbeats and heaves and in media res.

Watch. Relish.
Make me Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the anti-hero again.