Notes from Down Under (an ongoing series):The Beautiful Nostalgia of Watching One Hundred Years of Solitude Adapted for the Screen

It is an odd thing, watching a story you once lived in come alive on screen. A story that shaped you, built you. A story you thought you had left behind but that had never really left you. This is what it feels like to watch the TV adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. You sit there, staring at the screen, and suddenly, it’s all there again: the town of Macondo, shimmering in its dreamlike haze; the yellow butterflies trailing after love and loss; the deep sense that time is not linear but circular, folding over itself in loops and echoes.

I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude as a teenager. I read it in a cheap paperback edition, its pages too thin and its print too small, and yet the words felt infinite. It was not the kind of book you casually finish and move on from. It lodged itself in my mind, rearranged something inside me. Márquez showed me how fiction could hold everything at once: history, memory, myth, love, heartbreak, generations of life and death, all tangled together. He made me want to write. More than that, he made me want to read everything.

Because of Márquez, I found Isabel Allende and The House of the Spirits. I found Borges and his infinite libraries, Cortázar and his games. I found a world of writers who refused to play by the rules, who understood that magic wasn’t something you added to a story but something that was already there, hiding under the surface. They were the writers who taught me that the extraordinary is always embedded in the ordinary, if you know how to look for it.

And now, watching the series, I feel all of it again. Not just the story, but the way it changed me. Each frame reminds me of a moment in the novel: the rain that never stops, the train of bananas, the endless wars, the endless forgetting. The Buendía family feels as alive to me now as they did then, their sense of adventure and exile, their constant search for something they cannot name. I watch them and think of myself at that age—young, restless, carrying the same unnamed longing, scribbling in notebooks because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

There is something uncanny in all of this, something that blurs the line between memory and imagination, between Márquez’s Macondo and my own world. I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the Philippines, and even then, even as a teenager, I couldn’t shake the feeling of recognition. The magical realism of Márquez’s world was not foreign to me—it felt like home. In Filipino literature, too, there are ghosts and strange rains, a world where the supernatural doesn’t interrupt reality but merges with it. The two cultures, Latin American and Filipino, seem to share this: a deep acceptance of the uncanny, of the magic that slips into everyday life.

What I loved then, and what I love now, is how Márquez made it all feel inevitable. Levitation, memory loss, a woman ascending to heaven with the laundry—it wasn’t strange; it was life. And as I watch the series, I realize that this sense of the inevitable, the seamless blend of the real and the surreal, is what has stayed with me the most. It’s what I see in the stories I write and the stories I love. It’s what I see when I look at my own culture, at the way we tell stories, at the ghosts we still talk about as if they were neighbors.

I sit here now, nearly in tears, because it’s all so familiar and yet so distant. This adaptation has given me something I didn’t know I needed: a way to return to that younger version of myself, the one who didn’t know yet how much a book could change you. I watch One Hundred Years of Solitude on the screen, and I think about how far I’ve traveled since then, and how much of that journey started here, with this story.

What Márquez understood, and what this adaptation reminds me of, is that the past is never really gone. It loops back. It repeats. It folds into the present, and you find yourself, years later, watching a screen and remembering how it felt to be a teenager, reading a book for the first time and realizing that magic was real.