Dark Harbor

(Penguin Petit)

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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 constructing 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 humour, Mehta details the many dilemmas he encounters during the construction of his remarkable house, from ever-climbing costs to a recurrent infestation of potato bugs in the new-built basement.

Underlying this narrative is a richly allegorical tale about Mehta’s own struggles as a writer and as a man. Even while constructing 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 with and marries and, over the years, the children they have together.