Dark Harbor

Ved Mehta
June 2003     ISBN: 1560255285

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, on Deer Isle in Maine, and museums including 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 humor, 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 newly 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 the children they have together.

"A former contributor to The New Yorker, Mr. Mehta has written extensively, and exhaustively, about his life in India and New York and at Oxford. Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island...follows his adventures in the world of contractors, landscapers, fix-its and architects.... [Dark Harbor] reflects the craggy severity of the Maine island, where the waters are near freezing and the old-money social set can be not so warm. By his own description an Oxford curmudgeon, with tastes running to 'heavy, sombre' architecture, Mr. Mehta brought stiff expectations to the similarly crusty craftsmen of New England. The flat r's of their speech grate against his ear, and for all his talk of adaptation, he never lets readers forget this. But for Mr. Mehta, as for other practitioners of the genre, the house also serves as a metaphor for his own development: the foundation, the unforeseen difficulties, the extemporaneous and unbudgeted solutions and so on."

--New York Times

"Mehta...[an] exceptional memoirist, adds yet another captivating volume to his unparalleled Continent of Exile series, which chronicles his boyhood loss of sight and efforts to live and to write as much in the manner of the sighted as possible. In this installment, he recounts his adventure building a house he never felt he could afford on a small Maine island he could not navigate on his own.... As Mehta chronicles with poignant and often hilarious detail his improbable and oddly courageous undertaking, he muses over his determination to transcend his handicap, and parallels the construction of his house with the evolution of his marriage and realization of the sweet dream of a safe harbor in which to ride out life's chaos."

--Booklist

Ved Mehta was a staff writer at The New Yorker for 33 years. He has been a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has held the Rosencrantz chair in Writing at Yale University. All For Love is an independent book in a continuing literary autobiography, Continents of Exile. The earlier books in the series are Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Up at Oxford, The Stolen Light, Sound Shadows of the New World, The Ledge Between the Streams, Vedi, Mamaji and Daddyji. His other books include Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Portrait of India, and Fly and The Fly-Bottle.