You don’t have to be a pro gamer or the occasional nostalgic Nintendo fan to devour something. ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow’ (published by AdN and in Catalan by Edicions del Periscopi), First novel which is translated here by Gabrielle Zevin. (New York, 1977) on two talented young video game creators, Sam and Sadie. They both know each other as children, become friends, get angry, meet again, love each other and go through all the screens of their relationship without breaking. romantic friendship they can be many and very diverse among themselves.
The story set in the 1990s, the last decade when it was okay to be a loser in honesty or not be completely sold to the system. the emergence of the world of video games before the industry reached millionaire heights starting today. But ‘Tomorrow…’ is first and foremost the story of two soulmates with an unhealthy creative passion who make their way into adulthood with all the missteps, contradictions and disappointments that come with growing up.
It was chosen as a novel. One of the best of the year on GoodreadsA popular platform for readers, it has long been a bestseller in the United States, and Zevin, the author of over a dozen books, is writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of the film. Here it was met with a Twitter viralism and enthusiasm for reading which I wish was more widespread. Rejoice, one aspiring actress and writerIt blends the best of both worlds with surprising ease and depth that never gets heavy, quite the opposite. “The novel is centuries old and video games are barely 40 years old, so it’s hard to predict their future. For me, they’re both languages that describe the world that surrounds us,” he says.
Video games contain worlds
Zevin’s parents, both of immigrant backgrounds, worked at IBM in the 1970s, so from a very young age he had access to computers and games, which became a way to combat the loneliness of this only boy growing up in New York City in the early 1980s. “The first generation to play video games like Sam, Sadie, and me was born in the late 1970s, and I found it fascinating to fit the story of a lifetime through them,” explains the author, who has a lot more to do for history itself. with more creativity than consoles. “The hardest thing about ideas is not owning them, but knowing which ones are worth pursuing.. What I actually love about video games is that they contain a whole world within themselves, so they can go from anything you want, such as social class or identity.
Generation Y Sensitivity and Z
This is exactly one of the keys to making Zevin’s book a phenomenon among young readers: to touch on many issues that concern generations such as today’s generation Z and millennials. From cultural appropriation to abuse of power, from systemic machismo to gender fluidity, the book tackles all these issues in a gray language without being preachy and places them in the hyper-competitive MIT of the ’90s. unnoticed. For example, Sadie maintains an emotional-sexual relationship with her teacher that will ring all alarm bells today. “Many readers have asked me: Why don’t you punish him at the end of the book? My answer is, in the 90’s this was normal, what happens when your teacher is a great mentor but a terrible boyfriend? It’s tragedy that Sadie is with him, not because she’s younger or smart, but because she’s a great person,” explains Zevin.
allowance
In the novel, Sam and Sadie are unclear as to whether their play’s protagonist, Ichigo, should be a boy or a girl. They wonder if they don’t assign a gender to it, as they know that video games sell better when the protagonist is male. The same thing happens with the Hokusai wave (a wink on the cover): someone will accuse them years later of cultural appropriation for not being Japanese. “The important thing for me was to think about it. How can you defend something based on time? Or make the same mistake from a 2023 perspective,” explains Zevin. “I’m of the same descent as Sam, I’m half Jewish, half Korean, and many of his racial observations have crossed my mind. If you’re from two cultures at the same time, you feel like you’re not both,” admits Zevin. He has the idea that you can write about identities,” he criticizes.
divorce from friends
The friendship and tension that exists between Sam and Sadie, not necessarily sexual, is one of the fuels of a novel that reads as passionately as the protagonist’s program. Zevin wanted to fully explore all the stages of a friendship relationship and questions why there is no word for separation between two people, but no word to describe what happens between two friends when they stop being friends. “Friendship sometimes ends and you don’t even need to tell the other person.. You don’t need to tell a friend: look, we’ve come this far. You don’t get divorced from your friends, but that mourning marks you too, sometimes even more.”