Manu Joseph: Gabriel García Márquez in the time of Netflix
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It was inevitable that a tribute to Gabriel García Márquez would come under pressure to achieve a beautiful opening line, and having thus sidestepped the expectation, it would immediately mention one of the most famous opening lines in the history of literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." That is how his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude begins. The line merges three periods of time in a single sentence.
The narrator talks to us from the present, conveys that he will be executed in a distant future (he is not), and sets up the distant past of his father, where the novel properly begins. I wish I could say that this is why the sentence is memorable. Or, because a little boy’s discovery of ice is a beautiful surprise in such a grave sentence.
But I am sorry. I believe the line has become famous because that’s how far many people have gone with the book. More or less.
No doubt, an unknowable multitude have read it fully in many languages, but it is also one of those books that more people revere than have actually read. Now that Netflix has adapted it as a series, about 100 million people can get to know the classic, including film critics perhaps. And, even though they may like most of what they see, they may also wonder what the fuss over the novel was all about.
Like some classics, One Hundred Years of Solitude is actually a very good novel. Other aspects of its greatness come from the lottery of fame. Why some good novels are better known than other good novels is part of the absurd magic of luck.
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