New books from St. Pierre and Miquelon

I was looking forward to visiting the islands’ only bookstore, Lecturama. Since we had arrived in St. Pierre on a Saturday night, and the store was closed on Sunday, I had to wait until Monday to see it. In all of our walks around the town before then, however, we had never passed by the store, located at 8, rue Maître Georges Lefevre, so I grew excited as I approached it for the first time. Books about the islands were against two walls in a corner and I was happy to be left alone there for a good hour. The owner, Mme Pascale Derible, with whom I had been corresponding prior to my visit, came to check on me a few times to see if I had found what I was looking for. I was happy to find these five books:

Before we even left on our trip, Mark, who knew I would be looking for books about the islands, was kind enough to send me a link to the publisher of the novel tales from Dog Island: St. Pierre et Miquelon by Françoise Enguehard (translated by Jo-Anne Elder). I was expecting to find it at the store and they had multiple copies. The story is a fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandparents who left Brittany in the early 1900’s to start a new life on the islands. Since it was a translation I was interested in seeing the original French, yet did not find it. I checked the opening bibliographic classification pages to see what the French title was, as sometimes the original title and the translation’s title do not match, yet indeed, the French title was Les Litanies de l’Île-aux-Chiens, so I was not missing it on the shelves, since I was scanning the spines for Chiens. Yet the following evening on our last walk around town, as we passed the bookstore (long after it had closed), what did I see in the display window but a French copy of the novel. It must be the last one after all the others sold out.

I like books on regional dialects yet wasn’t expecting to find any here, so I was rather excited to see two of them, Mots et expressions de Saint-Pierre et Miquelon and Mots et expressions de Saint-Pierre et Miquelon tome 2 by Marc Dérible. The first part of the first volume was devoted to individual words, and the second part to phrases and expressions. As can be expected, the English language has a strong influence on the local dialect. I was surprised to see a page of words beginning with W (watcher as a synonym of regarder; winer as a synonym of venter). The local word for candy is kenn, as in D’moi un kenn. = Donne-moi un bonbon. Black-and-white photos are interspersed amidst the text. The second volume however indexes the individual words and phrases and expressions all together, and has far more illustrations. The phrase on the second volume, boëtter aux caramels, was oddly not found in that book and I had to consult the first volume to find it. It means to flatter or coax someone to get what you want (using kenn, if you will). The verb is derived from boued, which is Breton for food. When I put these two books on my shelves I noticed that the titles on the spines read in different directions. In volume one the title reads from top to bottom yet on the second volume, the spine title reads bottom to top, which doesn’t look too good when they’re placed side by side, but I do not store books upside down just to align their titles in the same direction, so I can deal with it.

Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon: Son histoire, de sa découverte à nos jours by Jean-Pierre Andrieux is a history mainly from 1816 to the present time, with chapters on the fishing industry, the evolution of water and air transport on and to and from the islands, Prohibition and smuggling, and the changing economic zones and territorial water limits and their consequences.

Deux siècles d’histoire à Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon 1816-2016: Bicentenaire de la rétrocession de l’archipel à la France / Two Centuries of History in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon 1816-2016: Bicentenary of the retrocession of the archipelago to France is a large-format diglot published by L’Arche Musée et Archives de la collectivité territoriale de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon with chapters on island history, economy, fishery, architecture and locality. A full-page photo occupied the left side of the spread while text and smaller photos occupied the right. The book is presented such that the reader has to flip it upside down to read it in the other language; my cover rendering does not illustrate this.