Trinity

Trinity presents a provocative triptych of narratives: the Gospel according to a magnificently visionary Mary Magdalene; an epistolary chronicle of the evolving intimacy between Emily Dickinson and an alternately curmudgeonly and affectionate God; and finally the odyssey of a woman artist whose travels lead her to Rennes-le-Chateau, a village in the French Pyrenees said to be the final resting place of Mary Magdalene, who according to local legend married Jesus and bore his children. Is there a connection between these three stories? Common sense would seem to refute it: "And yet the odds deny / this cooled and rhymed universe." . In this remarkable book, Susan Ludvigson offers a metaphysical x-ray of a cosmos in whose vastness the boundary between the sacred and profane is at best blurred, at worst illusory. It is a universe that reveals its secrets most readily to the acolytes of holy dissonance - Robert Johnson, Paganini, Mozart - those to whom the world comes diffused by pain or desire or spiritual exaltation. Most important, cooled and rhymed though it may seem, it is a universe that offers no easy explanations.