“Corto looked around, but there was nothing to see. He too had the sensation of dissolving like dust in the wind, of disappearing like a wave that the sea recovers. Only the echo of the last words remained. of Hugo Pratt still in the air, disordered, free, indistinct, slowly led him to relive a memory”. It begins like this, with a Corto Maltese lost and anguished after the death of his creator, ‘Corto Maltese and Irene of Boston.
Story of an almost impossible date’ poetic fable illustrated as always by the watercolors of Hugo Pratt, written by Marco Steiner and published by Cong. The new adventure of Corto Maltese, which has just landed in bookstores, is a surreal dialogue between Pratt’s sailor and the wreck of a boat with a glorious past, the Irene of Boston, in fact.
A text that has already been a theatrical show in 2017, entirely rethought by Steiner to open a new literary route: “Irene of Boston” is in fact also the first title of a new series (Escondida, like the island of ‘A ballad of the salt sea’) which will tell free narrative islands beyond the routes of the Prattian journey.
How can life start again when everything seems over, when whoever created you is no longer there? After Pratt’s disappearance, Corto Maltese wonders about its future. After a storm he ends up on a Sicilian beach, next to the wreck of Boston’s Irene, which is also eager to sail the seas again. The dialogue is a dream within a dream in which animals appear such as the raven Puck, an enchanting red-haired Irish girl and her cursed and favorite friend Rasputin who saves him and takes him on board his boat towards new horizons and new adventures, even after the death of its creator. With ‘Corto Maltese and Irene di Boston’ a new Corto is reborn, who will be able to choose his own destiny by going in search of Escondida, “the island that never was, the island to be invented”.
