## Colophon tags:: url:: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html %% title:: Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong? type:: [[clipped-note]] author:: [[@nytimes.com]] %% ## Notes > Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong? — [view in context](https://hyp.is/Pm-zNv8EEe-Dmwdndr1S2g/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) ⬆️ date:: [[2025-03-12]] > Netflix’s “Solitude” begins where the novel ends — in Macondo’s future, with the Buendia family’s house overgrown with trees. Then it flashes backward, stopping along the way to touch on the book’s opening line: “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.” — [view in context](https://hyp.is/38Z6gP8EEe-QBA9i1RYSCQ/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > When the series was announced, though, Netflix sounded a more global note: “We know our members around the world love watching Spanish-language films and series,” said its vice president for Spanish-language programming. Netflix is available in more than 190 countries, and once a piece of original content enters its library — whether a Korean drama or a Latin American telenovela — it can be viewed most anywhere. The company seems to have pursued “Solitude” as an iteration of hits like “The Crown,” “Squid Game” and “Money Heist”: local productions that captivate international audiences through a combination of regional specificity and broad televisual legibility. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/6BKKWP8EEe-osfMWKcja1g/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > In the novel, this line leads into a series of digressions — about wandering peddlers, and then the family patriarch’s zeal for new technology, and then his futile search for the coast, which leads to the discovery of a Spanish galleon mysteriously marooned deep in the interior — and only then, after most of a chapter, do we reach Aureliano’s encounter with the ice; it’s a masterful opening, instructing the reader on how to approach the novel’s wealth of diversions. In the show, that famous line is simply narrated atop an image of a middle-aged Aureliano staring stonily at the camera, before the show leaps back in time to tell its largely linear story. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/JdTOeP8FEe-2gNdLDj1UOw/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) ⬆️ Fair, though, isn't that a difference between being able to convey something in the written form versus having to adapt it for a visual medium? > It seems the aim, in Netflix’s world, is to put the text onscreen in a way that is maximally legible, with none of the experimentation that might allow an adaptation to become an autonomous work of art. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/leFGfv8FEe-oQvPnq_bWDg/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > As Netflix’s founder, Reed Hastings, has said, the company’s main competition is sleep; the point is to fill the platform’s library with an endless quantity of easily consumable content. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/vThFsP8FEe-rEdO45WDr6Q/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > Where once an adaptation of a major novel might have arrived with some fanfare, the process here seems rote and mechanical, simply dropping the work into a stream of interchangeable content based on other old things, from video games to tabloid crimes — [view in context](https://hyp.is/wF9Bxv8FEe-EVw9e8F9RDQ/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > Hollywood has spent a good century remaking important literature, and I am hardly the first to argue that “the book was better.” But these adaptations suggest something more expansive at work. Thanks to the scale of Netflix’s viewership and its surveillance trove of subscriber data, the company is starting to centralize the world’s moving images under a single umbrella; it is creating a platform where everything has to stream together well, playing to everyone everywhere. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/dn7GUv8GEe-QBNfNBZQzog/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html) > Its story is dissolved into a world of content which exists, entirely, as its own description — a sign on a tile representing something else altogether. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/klm45v8GEe-2hid8VgK3Rg/www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/magazine/netflix-one-hundred-years-of-solitude.html)