‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Part II review: A stunning, inevitable climax

Leonard Cohen sings of having “to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail” in ‘Last Year’s Man,’ indicating one of the ways to consume this gorgeous adaptation of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

At the end of the feature-length finale, the only thing to do is to go to the beginning and watch the 16 magnificent episodes all over again. The novel also prompts a similar desire — by the time you come to the end of the magic realism masterpiece and “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”, you want to go right back to the beginning and “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

The series, made with the blessings of the Márquez estate, makes a crucial change from the novel by starting at the end with a dead, bloodied pregnant woman, a ruined town, carnivorous ants, and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Through 16 episodes, we see seven generations of the Buendía family repeat the mistakes and tragedies of those who have come before until “the city of mirrors” that José Arcadio Buendía (Diego Vásquez) had founded “has become a city of mirages.”

On first reading, you keep referring to the family tree and try to keep the many Aurelianos and José Arcadios in order, while trying to follow a linear storyline, but then you realise that this is not the point of the book, though it meticulously follows time while simultaneously bending it to return to the beginning, the middle, or the end.

After starting at the end with Melquíades (Moreno Borja) drawing the Ouroboros (a serpent eating its tail), indicating a map of the story for lazy viewers, the series goes back to the beginning. Part II tells of Colonel Aureliano’s (Claudio Cataño) disillusionment and withdrawal from life and of future generations of the Buendías loving the wrong people and principles and dying for their troubles.

The delusional Fernanda del Carpio (Margarita Rosa) tries to order her children’s lives with dreams of her son becoming the Pope and her daughter, Renata Remedios (Juanita Molina), playing the clavichord. Naturally, nothing goes according to her plans.

Remedios the Beauty (Yiseth Garcerant) ascends into heaven while folding sheets. José Arcadio Segundo (Julián Román) brings the railways to Macondo, and also plays an important role in the banana rebellion. Renata falls in love with a mechanic at the banana company, Mauricio Babilonia (David Palacio) and has a child by him, Aureliano Babilonia.

By the time we reach the final episode, we have Aureliano Babilonia (Sebastián Osorio) living like a hermit while trying to decipher the Sanskrit texts left behind by Melquíades. Fernanda’s youngest daughter, Amaranta Úrsula (Estefanía Piñeres) is in Belgium but returns to Macondo with her aviator husband Gastón.

Despite being 100 minutes long, the finale feels both rushed and drawn out. It would have been nice to spend more time with Gastón and his velocipede. The Aurelianos and Arcadios dance towards destruction which is signified by the long-feared birth of a child with the pig’s tail. We finally come to see how the “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”

The acting continues to be top notch as also the visual splendor of the production. Macondo is beautiful as a dream and horrific as a nightmare. It is a “paradise of ruin” with the “clamour of ants” and the rain falling for “Four years, eleven months and two days”. There is the heart-breaking beauty of the yellow butterflies following Mauricio or the horror of the Fernanda’s statues of saints being burnt.

The music, the horrific violence, the period detail, and the excellent costumes all contribute to telling a story of a doomed family. That it meets a sticky end through its own actions and proclivities adds another layer of irony.

There is also irony in the death and erasure of the more than 3,000 people killed in the banana rebellion, which finds an echo in the fate of the Wayuu people who were in Macondo before the Buendías arrived and who carry its older histories. Visitación and her brother Cataure exist on the periphery of the narrative only to be erased altogether.

Watching the show in Spanish while reading the subtitles in English adds another layer of circularity to the experience. As most of us non-Spanish speakers have encountered Marquez’s novel through Gregory Rabassa’s excellent translation, which Marquez praised for being better than his original, we get a chance to hear the Spanish original while following the story in Rabassa’s words.

The best way to enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude is to surrender to it, and what a sweet surrender it turns out to be among the yellow butterflies, the burning saints, the endless rain, the doomed loves, and the magic bullets!    

One Hundred Years of Solitude is streaming on Netflix

Published – August 28, 2026 06:15 pm IST