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When Ved Mehta was first invited to Islesboro, a narrow, thirteen-mile-long
island off the coast of Maine, he could not have imagined the
far-reaching consequences of his visit.
 Seduced
by a dream of putting down roots in the New World, he finds himself
buying a fifteen-acre parcel of land in the rugged terrain of
Dark Harbor. To build his house, Mehta hires the architect Edward
Larrabee Barnes, famous for designing the IBM building in New
York, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, and museums
that include the Walker Art Center in Minnesota.
In sparse and evocative prose, Mehta describes the follies of
constucting a house on an island far removed from that other island,
Manhattan, where he lives, and where "sound-shadows"
effectively allow him to live as if he were not blind. In Dark
Harbor, sound disappears into the brush, banks, and woods like
a stone tossed into the ocean. With devastating honesty and poignant
humor, Mehta details the many dilemmas he encounters during the
constuction of his remarkable house, from ever-climbing costs
to a recurrent infestation of potato bugs in the newbuilt basement.
Underlying this narrative is a richly allegorical tale about
Mehta's own struggles as a writer and as a man. Even while constucting
the house, he finds himself building another edifice — helping
to bring into being an enchantment he had thought might elude
him. For the house in Dark Harbor is destined to become a home
for the woman he falls in love and marries and, over the years,
the children they have together.
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