Immortal
Traci L. Slatton

Reviewed by Treasure Ingels-Thompson

There are lives so moving, so significant that they touch hearts across spans of time and space.  These lives are not bounded by geographical demarcations, generational divides, or cultural definition.  Immortal, a novel by Traci L. Slatton, explores the lives of men like this, people who are immortalized through their work and art, their legacies, as Slatton views them through the perceptive eyes of a special child, a child who is physically immortal apparently and, save for these wise men, completely alone.

Luca Bastardo, we are told in the very beginning of the tale, is "the blessing and the curse of a Laughing God."  At the heart of this tale is the mystery of origin, both physical and spiritual, as Luca who seems destined to live a life of perpetual heartache also struggles with philosophical notions that question the judgment and compassion of a god who allows torture and abuse to beset a child.  In the city of Florence, a place that claims artists, philosophers, holy men, and great leaders among its citizenry, there is a dark vein that bleeds the sacrifice of innocence.  This is the Florence that Luca calls home as he is enslaved in a bordello catering to the aristocrats and supposed protectors of Florence. 

The tale Luca shares is riveting, and heartbreaking, and gutwrenching, and exquisite.  His laughter is our laughter, his heartache our heartache, his mystery something for us to unfold like a map.  In the bordello, Luca learns two valuable lessons--first that each of us must make the best of a cruel life, a laughing Fate, and second that there are those people who draw our swords and others who draw our compassion.  To each of these enticements, Luca responds passionately.  Even as his mysterious origins prolong his stint in the hellish bordello, Luca learns to manage his own course.  While he is molested and abused, his mind and heart are elsewhere, and the reader imagines that she too could fall into the art and landscapes that Luca describes.  When friendship demands it, Luca takes risks, and when his heart is broken by repercussions of his risks he realizes that he must make his own way or forever languish in his hell on earth.

Essentially a slave, Luca emanates a certain power, a sense of self, that draws the attention of various heads of Florence's society.  Unusual looking and beautiful in that, Luca is immediately noticeable for his angelic qualities.  But his quick mind and wit also draw attention.  It is this remarkable sense of being that has called attention to his plight to make it possible for him to be abducted in the first place, but it is also what will deliver him to the only bliss he can imagine in the end.

Luca's journey of self is one that transcends time and space, culture and expectation; his is a life that affects each person it touches.  As a student of alchemy, he seeks--despite warnings from mentors who would have otherwise--to convert something insignificant into gold, an element that is both earthly and revered.  Perhaps he never sees in himself what the reader does--a child treated as nothing who has the potential to achieve true greatness.  But, even as the hero is blind to his own glory, Traci L. Slatton shares his tale like an arcane secret to prove that "[t]here's a dividing line between the real and the unreal that breaks sometimes and allows the two halves to mix, like fluids in an alchemist's alembic."    As a curious student of life, Luca is the inspiration more than the observer of Florence's great artistic minds.  Painted by Giotto di Bondone, mentor to Leonardo Da Vinci, adviser to the Medicis, celebrant of Dante, conversant with Boccaccio and Petrarca, and apprentice to Geber (a man like himself whose life spans centuries), Luca Bastardo becomes central to the notions of Florence that we hold today. A bastard, an orphan, a vagabond, a whore, a statesman, a scientist, an artist, a warrior, a peacemaker, a heretic, a healer, an immortal,  a light--Luca Bastardo becomes all things where once he was nothing.  The alchemy that would render gold instead bestows enlightenment, and the reader is left converted in thought and insight, a puddle distilled through the alembic that Immortal becomes in reading, experiencing it.

It is Slatton's comprehensive knowledge of medieval Florence and her understanding of the mindsets of her people that best informs this tale.  At a time when plague, and war, and poverty unsettled the known world, a hero who could outlive adversity would have been revered.  And in our time, a time that mimics in many ways the medieval world that seems removed by time, technology, and understanding, such a hero will be honored.  Like his friend, the Wanderer, Luca must discover for himself both his consolamentum, baptism and deliverance, and his comitatus, community/comradeship.

It has been a while since I was so moved by a character that I felt his pain, his heartache, his anguish so deeply that I cried.  And never before have I been so touched by a story, its people, and its author that I had to allow myself distance before I could write a review.  But Traci L. Slatton and her dear Luca Bastardo have touched me in such a way now.  It has been a month since I first read this novel, and only now am I able to write.  Immortal elicits powerful emotion; read it if you can appreciate the beauty of unity in heartache, if you would like to prove that "every life has meaning," if you seek guidance in finding a meaning all your own.  And remember Slatton who will be immortalized through the beautiful story that she imagines and shares.