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    Trinity: A Novel
    Trinity: A Novel
    Trinity: A Novel
    Ebook322 pages5 hours

    Trinity: A Novel

    By Louisa Hall

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer—father of the atomic bomb—as told by seven fictional characters

    J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb he helped create, before ultimately lobbying against nuclear proliferation.

    Through narratives that cross time and space, a set of characters bears witness to the life of Oppenheimer, from a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John. As these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives.

    In this stunning, elliptical novel, Louisa Hall has crafted a breathtaking and explosive story about the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, about public and private tragedy, and about power and guilt. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9780062851994
    Author

    Louisa Hall

    Louisa Hall is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Iowa and the author of the critically acclaimed novels Reproduction, Trinity, Speak. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals, and she is the recipient of grants from Yaddo, Macdowell, and The T.S. Eliot Foundation. She lives in Iowa City with her family.

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    Reviews for Trinity

    4/5

    611 ratings21 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Not an all time favorite, but a perfect fit for my trip to Ireland.
    • 5/5
      When I read this book it opened my eyes to the English oppression of the Irish for centuries. The cruel and inhumane greed for a "colony" was mind blowing. I'm second generation Irish and it hurt my heart to know how my countrymen were treated. I've felt differently about the English ever since. I have great respect for them, but I don't completely trust them.
    • 3/5
      This book offers up an interesting time in history in a country not given much thought aside from silly-jolly St. Patrick's Day. Some of the characters are drawn better than others, and there are large portions of the story that were very entertaining. Uris goes from telling his tale from first to third person, then back again as it seems to suit - whenever the protagonist's best buddy is around to pick up the narrative, we hear it all through him for a certain number of pages. Then, he's out of the story line and we're back to the tale recounted in third person. This type of approach may not bother many readers, but I found it disconcerting, like the author couldn't make up his mind how best to present it all. I'm glad I read it, if only to get a glimpse into the effects of the British Industrial revolution on their Irish subjects, and the ongoing political oppression that leads to the beginning of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Still, the style is rather simplistic (Irish Catholics: good! Irish Protestants and the British: bad!) and the book drags on from one injustice to another, leading up to what can only be a bad ending for our hero - and it's almost a relief when it's over. I'm glad I read the book, but not certain I could read the sequel without some seriously uplifting music playing in the background.
    • 4/5
      Excellent historical fiction about Ireland's struggles with England and the fight to declare it's independence. Trinity is based on actual events and takes the reader on a journey throughout Ireland and tells the heartbreaking history of a country that longed to remove itself from the tyrannical rule of the British and Britain's never ending schemes to keep the Irish poor, hungry and so desperate that Irish countrymen and women had no other choice but to flee to other countries, never to return to their beloved Ireland again. If you love Ireland, you will love Trinity.

      There is also a sequel to Trinity. REDEMPTION.
    • 4/5
      Insightful understanding to the conflicts in Ireland.
    • 2/5
      Happy Saint Patrick's Day, ladies and gentlemen. As you are aware, anybody with greater than 1/32nd Irish descent in the United States is able to participate in today's festivities, which includes pretty much everybody here. So have at it.

      Partly due to the upcoming festivities, and partly because I had a long plane trip, I breezed through this. It makes for a fair airplane read, but not much else. I did enjoy the snippets of historical background and news clippings scattered near the end, but it really isn't too complex. Good versus evil, good gives a hard fight, good still loses, but they still Learn a Lesson. Lots of caricatured personalities and dry writing. But it serves.

      Ah well.
    • 5/5
      I reluctantly picked this book up after receiving it as a Christmas present. Boy was I wrong about my initial impressions. I devoured the entire book in less than a week. I found the story fascinating. The dichotomy between the haves and have-nots in Ireland and the constant struggle was intriguing. The author created well rounded characters, who seemed to suffer unimaginably. The book read like nonfiction. Overall, highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book.
    • 3/5
      An historical novel with fictional characters and events set against the history of Ireland from the1880s to 1914. It is pulp fiction and so the heroes are very heroic and the female lead characters act nobly in all situations., everything is black and white, with very little shades of grey, however the background to the story is well handled. The struggle for existence of the Irish catholic farmers and the industrialisation of Belfast are brought vividly to life. Everything is ratcheted up a notch too high but the underlying problems and issues are laid out in such a way as to stir the emotions. The book is wide ranging touching on: Gaelic family life, factory working conditions, rugby league, Irish unionism, terrorism, religious fervour.and colonialism. Uris manages to keep all these balls in the air and at the same time tell a good yarn if at times it becomes a bit episodic. I sort of enjoyed this novel, but it became a bit of an epic at 750 pages.
    • 4/5
      Trinity. Leon Uris. 1976. I don’t know how I missed this book since I had read every novel he had written up to this time. I can only think that at the time of its publication I was not interested in Ireland. If you liked Ari Ben Canaan in Exodus and Sean O’Sullivan in Armageddon, you will also like Conor Larkin in Trinity. Uris had a gift for creating romantic, tragic male characters and Conor Larkin fills the bill. Readers follow the horrible history of Ireland from the potato famine in the 1840s to the Easter Uprising in 1916 through the lives of Conor Larkins’ Irish family and the lives of the rich protestant industrialist Frederick Weed and his daughter Caroline. This is a readable historic novel of a terrible time
    • 3/5
      Let's begin by stipulating that Uris is a pulp fiction writer and should be read and reviewed on those terms. There's absolutely nothing wrong with pulp fiction - it's a great and wonderful genre full of entertainment value. With Uris' books the formula is pretty simple: Our hero is noble, well-read, and self-sacrificing. He's closed himself off, but is waiting for the right woman. The right woman is also noble and self-sacrificing, but strong-willed and beautiful. He sets these folks down in the middle of some big historical conflict and then uses them to give readers a bit of a history lesson. He's typically got a bias, but most history does. These are good solid historical epics.I really like Mila 18, his book about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It inspired me to read a lot of actual history of the event including a number of diaries that were recovered from there. Likewise with Trinity, which I read once before, I will most likely go read more Irish history.Trinity is a decent vehicle for imparting quite a bit of history from the Irish perspective. It's a good read for making you think about the impact of imperialism and industrialization. There's an excellent set of chapters on early twentieth century factories and a factory fire that will remind you why unions came about in a really visceral way.This is a dense read, but it's entertaining and interesting in parts and is probably a good gateway to other more substantive reads on the subject matter.
    • 5/5
      Favorite book. Hated to finish it.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book, read a lifetime ago. At the time, I remember thinking that it was the only book to adequately explain 'the trouble' in Ireland and how they came about.
    • 4/5
      An historical novel, Trinity is about the Irish uprising and battle for independence. The author chose to show the plight of the Irish Catholics through fictional characters and fictionalized actual events. It covers the history of the conflict from about the mid-1800s to just before the Easter Rising, jumping back and forth between Catholic, Protestant and English characters.I appreciated the scope and depth of the information, I really knew very little about this moment in history. The author knows how to build a story and grip your emotions and sympathies for the characters and events, as well as set out clearly the motivations of the parties involved.At the end though, I felt as if I had been emotionally tweaked. I will not believe that every person committed to their faith is an evil, bigoted, hateful human being and that the only compassionate, sensible and decent human beings are the atheists and revolutionaries. Nor can I believe that every English man and woman is a beast who cares nothing for others. That is the impression the book leaves you with. It is not even-handed in any way. I don't like to be tweaked by ministers, politicians or writers, however, I am glad to have read this book, as it did give me insight to the bitterness and sorrows of a part of humanity, and what they did to overcome it. It also made me dig deeper into a part of history I had only glossed over until now.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the better books I've ever read. It is a true Irish saga with all the right ingredients; the poor Catholic family, the wealthy Protestent family, economic progression, societal destruction, love affairs, political uprisings, etc. The book is quite long but the story propels itself with a passion. I love books that I can really "sink my teeth into" and this one fit the bill!
    • 3/5
      This was a slow read, which isn't typical for me. It started slow because of the dialect, and because of the task of figuring out how so many characters fit into the story. Mainly, though, it was slow because of the depth of history it covers, a history with which I was largely unfamiliar.The reward of reading this book, though, lies in the history it covers. I knew only vaguely, going in, of the strife between Ireland and England, and this book really explores that conflict and gives a face to it. On that score, it's a pretty staggering work.In terms of the writing, I thought it was a little clumsy. Dreams were used as plot points on a couple of occasions, which strikes me as extremely lazy, and I couldn't quite figure out the purpose of the occasional first-person narrator, especially when, if you can forgive the spoiler, he doesn't even live to tell the tale. In general, I was disappointed in the characters, which were pretty flat and one-dimensional, nothing more than tools for advancing the plot.Still, for all of its flaws, this was a pretty good read, and I'll soon be taking up the sequel, Redemption. I'm given to understand that some of Trinity's loose ends are tied up in that one, and I'm definitely interested to see how that works.
    • 5/5
      Years ago: I better understood the complexities of the religious conflict in Ireland because of Leon Uris's work. It still is entertaining and thought provoking although it does not seem quite as relevant as it may have been 30 years ago...
    • 5/5
      I first read it when I was eleven. I've read it twice since, and everytime I read it, I enjoy it again. It makes me furious in some places, proud in others, but in the end I always feel as though I have worked through everything with the characters.
    • 5/5
      Story set within the context of the Irish uprising to gain independence from Great Btitain and the continuation of revolutionary activity as a result of the creation of Northern Ireland. Conor Larkin and the other characters created by Leon Uris are compelling. A very good read, laced with history.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my all time favorite books. I found myself wondering if I was going to be able to get through it around page 150 or so, just because so many names and complicated pieces of history seemed to be jammed in at once, but by page 200 (and out of about 800, it's hardly anything!) I was absolutely hooked and could not pull myself away! Everything Uris writes is inensely charged with emotion without ever being melodramatic or unbelievable, and the characters he breathed to life in this novel are still today as vivd in my mind as they became 4 years ago when I first picked up the book.
    • 5/5
      Good. Brings to life the conflict in Northern Ireland.

    Book preview

    Trinity - Louisa Hall

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