Title: Surfing the Unknown i
Author: Dodzi Amemado
Date: 2022
Publisher: Baico
Quote: "I knew survival would be my only option."
This is one of those coming-of-age novels that are probably more autobiography than anything else, even if names are changed. We first see Kainalu, from Vanuatu, feeling attracted to a girl at university in "Loonland" (located north of "Vespuccica"), but determined to be faithful to a girl back at home, even though they hadn't known each other for long and he's not sure that she's being faithful to him. My interest in stories about fickle young men is not great, so it's pleasant to report that Surfing the Unknown is not that sort of story at all.
Kainalu's mind is soon taken off the search for excuses to cheat by the bureaucracy, which collects a great deal of a foreign student's money while limiting the student's ability to find work. Kainalu finds himself homeless in the depths of the Loonian winter, with temperatures 25 degrees below zero, Celsius. His adviser, Professor Stinez, seems a little too eager to assume he's going to wash out--if Kainalu freezes to death on the street, what's a foreign student more or less?
We're not told which university Kainalu attends. It doesn't sound like McGill, although enough of the names are French that it might be, because McGill used to be notorious for offering on-campus housing only for a student's first year. By their second year all students were expected to have found lodgings of their own. It was proof of the students' having enough survival intelligence to be worth educating. Kainalu would apparently have been allowed to stay on campus if he'd had more money.
Anyway, as students usually do, he meets an older man who lets him work for his rent. This is Loic Rebel. The name is probably chosen to suggest a philosophy that might be called Stoic, the adoption of which is a bit of a rebellion aganst contemporary popular culture. Loic teaches Kainalu to cope with his difficulties in a somewhat Stoic way.
Stinez will have more respect for Kainalu by the end of the book. So will readers. So, probably, will the classmates who don't know where Vanuatu is but compare campus life with "where you came from" as if they had any idea what things are like there. This might, of course, have taken place before students could look such things up on their mobile phones...
For a coming-of-age novel, Surfing the Unknown also has some potential use as a self-help book. If you are a young adult with Problems and all the school "mental health" office seems to want to do is hand out feel-good pills that don't happen to make you feel good, this story may be a better guide to maturity and enlightenment/
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