“One Hundred Years of Solitude” never lacked suitors for its adaptation to the cinema screen. The author’s correspondence reveals that he received offers even before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Contrary to popular belief, he did not reject the offers because of a distrust of cinema, which was in fact one of his professional passions. In 1963, two years before starting to write this novel, he worked as a film screenwriter in Mexico City. He was doing so well that in a letter that year he told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that he pictured himself soon working in Hollywood.

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It was thanks to cinema that García Márquez learned to unite magic and reality, two fundamental elements of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” He used many cinematographic tricks and techniques when writing it. And he did so from the first page: The moment when Colonel Aureliano Buendía stands before the firing squad ends in a flashback, to when he first touched ice as a child and Macondo was only a small village.

What did cause the writer some consternation about adapting his novel was determining which audiovisual format was best suited to convey the stories of Macondo. He knew that such a work could not be compressed into a few hours. Therefore, what he actually opposed was any adaptation with a feature film format. García Márquez had more trust in television’s narrative possibilities. In 1989, he told The New York Times that with TV “in one night you can reach 10 million viewers and that’s the idea — to reach that audience with ideas and quality.” He knew that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” had that potential. When the actor Anthony Quinn was interested in adapting it, he told the writer that the novel would be “ideal for a 50-hour television serial.”

All literary classics share an ability to reinvent themselves generation after generation, but each classic has its own challenges for screen adaptation. A respectful adaptation must consider details such as local speech and culture, translated into a more universal dimension for a global audience. Otherwise, the series will fall flat, as did the adaptations of his books “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

The lack of dialogue in “One Hundred Years of Solitude" is one of the most complex technical obstacles. Dialogue makes up only 5 percent of the book. Characters rarely exchange more than three sentences in a row, buried in pages and pages of narration. In his writing of the novel, the author eliminated many phrases from the final text that could be rescued to resolve some of the difficulties of adaptation. Omissions include characters, paragraphs, images and even dialogue that could be heard onscreen for the first time.