You don’t need to be a professional gamer or the occasional nostalgic Nintendo fan to devour Mañana, y mañana, y mañana (published by AdN and in Catalan by Edicions del Periscopi), the first novel translated here from Gabrielle Zevin. (New York, 1977) is about 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 the many and varied screens a romantic friendship can have.
Set in the ’90s, the last decade when it was okay to be an honest loser or not be completely sold to the system, the story chronicles the emergence of the world of video games at a time when the industry was not reaching the millionaire dimensions of today. . But Tomorrow… first and foremost is 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. The novel was named one of the best of the year on Goodreads, a popular reader platform, has been a longtime bestseller in the United States, and Zevin himself, the author of over a dozen books, is writing the screenplay. it’s a movie adaptation. Here it was met with a Twitter viralism and enthusiasm for reading which I wish was more widespread.
An avid actor and writer, Zevin combines the best of both worlds with a surprising ease and depth that never feels heavy, quite the opposite. “The novel dates back centuries, and video games are only 40 years old, so their future is hard to predict. For me, both are languages that describe the world that surrounds us,” he says.
computer against loneliness
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 to have them, but to know which ones are worth pursuing. What I actually love about video games is that they contain a whole world in themselves, and so they can come out of anything you want: social class or identity, for example ».
Generation Y Concerns and Z
This is precisely one of the keys to making the book a phenomenon among young people: its sensibility to address many of the issues that concern today’s generations, such as Generation Z and Y. 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.
In the novel, Sam and Sadie are unclear as to whether their play’s hero, 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. “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 once, you feel like you’re from neither,” she admits. there is,” he criticizes.
The friendship and tension that exists between Sam and Sadie, not necessarily sexual, is one of the fuels of the novel. 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. “You don’t divorce your friends, but this grief marks you too, sometimes even more.”