The Silver Hearted

by David McConnell

Set against a background of revolution and profiteering in a port town, this is the story of an unnamed narrator, who is hired by shadowy investors to protect chests of silver coins. He turns to a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593501404
• ISBN13: 9781593501402
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Alyson Books
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Literary Delight

In a war-torn city where residents are killing their pets so insurrectionists won't eat them, the protagonist of THE SILVER HEARTED is charged with transporting twenty-four unwieldy boxes filled with valuable coins to the City of Z. With this treasure in tow, he boards a ship filled with shady characters and sets out on nightmare adventure with danger at every turn. It's not just the high stakes that makes this book spellbinding, but also the alchemic language--it's tight, precise, and gorgeous. Like the protagonist, we feel disoriented at the beginning, but McConnell renders this strange world beautifully and makes some very brave choices that really work. The word "literature" is tossed around so carelessly these days that we sometimes forget what it means. In THE SILVER HEARTED, McConnell masterfully reminds us.

Hurts So Good

I've ever read, and I hesitate even to hint at its storyline, for I'm pretty sure McConnell's imagination is larger than my powers of understanding. There's a narrator with whom we identify in a near-total manner, no small feat since his life is so different than our own. He's a wealthy scion of a great family whose trust fund has suddenly dwindled to a sub-zero balance, forced to find actual work. What he winds up doing is like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Fitzcarraldo, a work of obsession involving the high seas, and the inland rivers snaking through a war-torn country, and the dirty port cities that service merchant seamen. McConnell is a atylist who has sometimes been accused, unfairly in my opinion, of being unwilling to tell a story. What calumny! The story may amble a bit, getting from one exotic locale to the next, but along the way there are some riveting setpieces that heat up the action to an tense, scary boil even as they serve to widen and deepen the scope of the story. We all know that a broken up voyage, spent guarding a valuable treasure, has always been an allegory for life, and we turn to allegory, I sometimes think, in order to expand our understanding of our own lives into (what Baudrillard would call) a paroxysm... understanding through excess. In scene after scene, McConnell conjures up a universe just like ours, but with one difference, it's fictional. McConnell's narrative makes clear the absolute equivalent of pirate and merchant. So when we close the book, we return to our own neocapitalist existence with new eyes. Our hero is forced to secrete huge amounts of cash money on his person, and his physical travails concerning the boxes the money is hidden in, convince us of money's true weight and labor. Each box weighs eighty-three points, easy enough to store on a bottom shelf, but when the shelf is three or four feet off the ground, you have to make your body unfold like a rose to hoist it up that high. We carry around this weight at our peril, and it displaces our bodily functions due to the extreme exigency of always watching it. Our hero doesn't even know how to get off the money trail, and the one thing that might distract him--love--is just around the corner and thus just out of reach. The Silver-Hearted is a sumptuous ride through a nightmare, and it comes with all of its author's trademark wit and sexiness. Give it a try, you don't want to miss out on an extraordinary trip.

pirate treasure

In David McConnell's novel, "The Silver Hearted," a man must transfer trunks of silver coins from a ghostly ship where most of the crew are dead or missing, first to a mariner's hotel in harbor town, then upriver to escape encroaching anarchy. The protagonist is unnamed, cities are referred to by letters and the action takes place during an unspecified revolution, yet these mysteries are perfectly housed in the erotic and paranoid atmosphere of the novel. Everyone is a potential threat to man's coins, and part of the pleasure of the book is in his minute calibrations of the characters he must deal with, including an sentimental and obese ship captain who may or may not be responsible for the loss of the crew and a waif-like cabin boy who is at once, alluring and dangerous. I loved the foggy, nautical atmosphere in the novel and read with a sort of adolescent fervor, as if i were devouring it under the covers late at night with a flashlight. And just as i might have done when I was thirteen, I tried to make the novel last longer towards the end by reading in smaller increments. The book has another, very adult thrill: the writing is not just good, it's extraordinary. I recommend it completely.

A Captivating Literary Thriller

David McConnell's beautifully written literary thriller is one of the most enjoyable novels I've read in a long time. Told by an unnamed narrator, set in an unnamed country, McConnell's story is an intriguing adventure story reminiscent of Joseph Conrad with comic touches of Graham Greene. This book is page-turningly suspenseful and also quite sexy. The narrator meets Topher Addison Smith and McConnell's description of him illustrates how every sentence in The Silver Hearted is lovingly crafted: "He couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen. He'd let a smattering of whiskers grow long on his chin. And the blond prickling of a moustache didn't look virile so much as childishly vain. Still he was big and might grow huge. His skin was sheet white, very strange in that climate. A healed break (I later learned) thickened the bridge of his nose, which gave him a slightly leonine air. In his short life his body sustained a lot of other damage. A V-shaped nick was missing from his jug ear. A messy vaccination scar was smeared on the skin of his man-sized shoulder. Another blurry magenta scar ran from his chest's smattering of pimples to his navel, which had the beard his elfin face couldn't grow. Even his nails were damaged, bitten to stubs around which pillowed blushing, gnawed- upon skin. His eyes, too, appeared damaged. Pale blue, they had dark flaws like missing shards." It's a perfect word-portrait of a young pirate. Readers with a sense of adventure will love this book.

Unforgettable dream story

This very strange, irresistible novel is the finest update of the Conrad style I've ever seen, and the best "gay novel" in years. The narrator's extremely sensitive, unique style of telling his amazing story makes the book wildly exciting to savor, and I finished the book only wishing it would go on to the next stage, to be continued indefinitely. A really impressive accomplishment. Dazzling in the best way.