Trinity

A Novel

By: Louisa Hall

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, David Colacci, Saskia Maarleveld, John Lee, Brittany Pressley, Yetta Gottesman, Charlie Thurston, Amy Landon

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.

©2018 Louisa Hall (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

Intriguing Take on J. Robert Oppenheimer

3.5. Trinity is a somewhat engrossing novel but it sometimes strays from its intent, making the reading of it a little bit of a slog. The novel is split into three sections involving J. Robert Oppenheimer -- before the bomb, during the testing of the bomb and after the bomb. It is fascinating to see how the inventor of the bomb reacted to his life's work.

The novel also includes the "testimonies" of seven fictional characters who had different and various interactions with Oppenheimer. Sometimes, these testimonies are engaging and enrich our understanding of Oppie's life but other times (the last testimony by Helen Childs, for example), they are unwieldy, have very little to do with Oppie himself and more to do with the life of the person providing the testimonial.

Still, Louisa Hall's novel presents Oppenheimer in a way that is unique and different from the man we know as the father of the atomic bomb.

The novel is narrated by a whole host of people, all of whom do an excellent job.

Best most creative structure

I found this series of glimpses into Robert Oppenheimer’s personality and experience to be ingenious and riveting . The readers were excellent!

Gripping and illuminating

I loved every moment of this book. I can’t stop thinking about all it reveals about the inner lives of women, the emotional violence we endure and inflict daily, and how we hold people responsible for their actions. Brilliant!!

The Bomb Will Always Be Fascinating

great book about the bomb and the people involved in its creation, although not much about the people whose cities were vaporized by it.

told through a series of chronological and overlapping first person accounts, we slowly get a picture of the peculiar man that is Robert Oppenheimer and the complexities that he exemplifies. however, this is not a biography. this story is about the narratives that we construct to explain the people and events that plague and enrich our lives, before realizing that we can no more understand another person than we can understand how humanity decided to proliferate nuclear and thermonuclear weaponry.

some of the passages are absolutely stunning, and are performed very well by the diverse cast of voice actors. I will be purchasing this as a physical book soon, to really dig into section that I enjoyed but wasn't able to dwell on.

my next audiobook is Speak, also by Louisa Hall!

Boring. Not really about Oppenheimer.

I would have been more open to this novel if nearly all of the women were not filled with such self loathing and wallowed in their victimhood. Scene after scene of powerless women being done wrong by the selfish menfolk.
Having just read a biography of Oppenheimer, I was anxious to hear what a novelist might do with the fascinating life of such a complex man. This isn’t that novel. Too bad.
Narrators vary from excellent to just okay.