If you’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel Laureate Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (as many of us have) and plan to watch the Netflix adaptation of the Buendía family’s multi-generational saga, put your expectations aside. Although the series closely follows the book, it’s not the book. With its own visual language and interpretation of the novel, it’s a courageous retelling of one of the 20th century’s most complicated literary masterpieces.

And it’s powerful.

Fifty-seven years after Solitude’s publication in 1967, Netflix has brought it to the small screen. The first eight episodes – there is a part two – will begin streaming on Dec. 11. Directed by Argentinian Alex García López (The Witcher) and Colombian Laura Mora (Killing Jesus) and written (the book doesn’t have much dialogue) by Oscar-nominated Puerto Rican writer Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries), it was a monumental risk that paid off brilliantly.

The challenge was chronicling seven generations of the Buendía family in a fictional town called Macondo, where a rivulet of blood is a death foretold. How do you translate a literary magnum opus that embodies Latin American colonialism and banana republicanism? How do you adapt to film a profoundly visual story that left Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes “crushed?”

You make it your own and treat the book as your Bible.

“We had the bible, we had Cien Años there, attached, close, where whenever there was a doubt, any moment we had a question, we always returned to the book,” García López said in a recent interview.  “Obviously, it’s an adaptation, and the literary format differs greatly from the visual one. My principal objective was to capture the novel’s tone.”

In a Netflix interview on Instagram, Mora, who also directed a number of the episodes in part one, said, “One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the history of the world in this complex, tropical style, which has been named magical realism.”

The first part of the series spans 50 years. It starts – as it must – with Colonel Aureliano Buendía in front of a firing squad, remembering a “distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” It moves on to the marriage of cousins José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, and then proceeds to the prediction that their offspring will be born with a pig’s tail, the honor killing of Prudencio Aguilar, the founding of Macondo, the arrival of religion, politics, and finally revolution to the only idyllic town. Add to that a couple of weddings and deaths.

Filmed in Colombia in Spanish and with a predominantly Colombian cast, One Hundred Years of Solitude took more than six years to develop. García Márquez (a cinema lover) didn’t want his masterpiece adapted into a film. According to his children, he worried the book would not fit into one movie and had to be in Spanish.

As I started watching, I expected the soul of the book to be missing. I thought that Macondo could only exist within its pages, a place where death is yellow flowers, a priest levitates, a virgin’s orgasms cause a house to quake, a bag of bones clacks and clunks, and tropical dictators dress like Napoleon Bonaparte.

I was wrong.

The series exceeded my expectations. It conjures up Macondo, the oppressive heat, incessant rains, and insomnia in a half-light. It uses passages from the book in a Voice of God narrative, weaving in its prose and imagery. It undresses the thick tapestry of García Márquez’s writing to reveal its core: politics, religion, freedom, passion, and solitude.

The camera work from the opening scene on is stunning. Cinematographers Paulo Pérez and María Sarasvati’s camera gives sweeping endless motion. They allow us to enter Macondo’s rooms, watch through windows and doors, and get so close to the characters that we feel what they feel.

The Colombian actors who bring life to the characters – many unknown to the general public – are exceptional. One of the best performances in the series is Claudio Cataño as the quiet yet unnervingly stoic Aureliano Buendía. The Buendía patriarch is played with gravitas and patriarchal madness by Marco González, and Leonardo Soto is a perfect bull of a José Arcadio.

I was disappointed by the portrayal of Melquiades (Moreno Borjas), who represents death and the occult in the novel. He is characterized as a Spaniard and doesn’t equate with the traveler I had in my head.

The series finds its center in Gabo’s (as the author’s friends called him) women – Amaranta (Luna Ruiz), Rebeca (Nicole Montenegro), Remedios (Cristal Aparicio), and Pilar (Viña Machado). The women marry, some are barren, others give birth. Rebeca is a feral orphan who eats dirt to quiet her sexual frustration, Amaranta cuts herself in honor of unrequited love, Remedios is innocence personified, and Pilar’s axilas smell of smoke.

But, the spiritual axis of the book and series is Úrsula (Marledy Soto Rivas is outstanding as the older; Susana Morales excels as the younger), the mother who sells candies shaped like animals to make ends meet. She is the heroic matron who confronts authority and wears a matriarchal tree pin close to her heart.

It could be argued that Gabo’s female archetypes are the familiar Mother, Virgin, Whore. They are. But he makes them protagonists, not victims. We who grew up in Latin America and the Caribbean recognize these women as our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts.

In his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, García Márquez said his writing wasn’t a genre he invented. “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. Our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has captured the tone of the greatest novel since Don Quixote, rendering it (and our lives) believable. The film also bottled the bitter perfume of Macondo, which still exists today. I should know. I live in one – it’s called Puerto Rico.