Drawing on Hoare’s experience of the natural world, and of the elements that shape our contemporary lives, from suburbia to the wide open sea, Hoare enters 15th century artist Albert Dürer's time machine.
... magnificent ... a captivating journey through art and life, nature and human nature, biography and personal memoir. Giants walk the earth: Dürer and Martin Luther, Shakespeare and Blake, Thomas Mann, Marianne Moore, WH Auden, David Bowie. Hoare summons them like Prospero, his writing the animating magic that brings the people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way ... Anyone familiar with his sea trilogy, starting with the prize-winning Leviathan in 2008, will know the liquid beauty of Hoare’s prose and his apparently limitless gift for witness and insight. He is as powerfully struck by the wonders of this world as Dürer. Each chapter, no matter how wide its flow, is anchored in a particular image by Dürer – the hare, the patient greyhound, the astounding self-portraits – and it is extraordinary to see them anew through Hoare’s eyes ... Hoare’s feeling for Dürer exceeds anything I have ever read ... most affecting is the way that Dürer’s life permits Hoare to recall passages of his own ... Reading this book like a person mesmerised by cosmic events in the sky, I scarcely understood the significance of the opening encounter between the author and a capuchin monkey. Its meaning only becomes fully apparent towards the end, deepening the narrative immeasurably. The revelation must stay inside Albert and the Whale, which is his greatest work yet. But it is further testimony to Hoare’s exceptional empathy for both man and beast, for seeing through the eyes of a primate, a greyhound or an artist.
Hoare writes with the license of the nonexpert; you can feel the delight he takes in being unbound by anything but his enthusiasms. He is alternately precise and concealing. His biographical sections are both elliptical and redolent of entire lives. His art criticism is often stirring ... Another of the author’s pivots might predict whether you find his approach enchanting or somewhat dizzying: For about 60 pages near its middle, the book becomes a group literary biography, primarily of the novelist Thomas Mann and the poet Marianne Moore...This extended section is certainly connected to Dürer: Moore and Mann both referenced him in their own work; Auden considered him in the lectures. But it requires you to stretch along with Hoare ... Somehow, Hoare’s frequent cuts between the present, the recent(ish) past and more distant history end up feeling like no cuts at all; instead of whiplash or disorientation, what results is an almost calm feeling of all these times existing simultaneously, in the moment of reading ... If Hoare’s overall tone is self-serious, he allows glimpses of the ridiculousness that can come with fixation ... This book requires patience, and a mild tolerance for passing clouds of pretension or obscurity; but these hazards are just residual effects from the forceful weather system that is Hoare’s imagination. He almost inevitably begins writing at one point about W.G. Sebald, a kindred spirit whom he came to know. Hoare’s recap of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is the summary of one digressive book nested inside another. Hoare says that book 'pulls you in like the tide.' And if you just get in far enough, so does this one.
... dreamy ... Hoare’s way has always been to swim with the currents he catches, and Dürer’s biography ends up generously spliced with entertaining digressions and unexpected but illuminating juxtapositions ... Before long, in his typically allusive and impish style, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected, however loosely, to Dürer’s work and its themes ... Barriers of time and place are irradiated by the power of Hoare’s vision ... We are soon immersed in Lake Hoare. His eschewal of quotation marks blurs the distinction between voices. We’re often unsure if he’s recalling his own experiences or reinscribing those of others. His passionately personal engagement with his idols is all the more persuasive for these attempts to merge with them; there is no facade of critical dispassion ... While some readers may struggle to stay afloat in this sea of glinting references and wandering currents, others will be happy to join Hoare in his diving bell to revelation ... From their lives and works, he extrapolates an entire cosmology, a way of seeing the world every bit as rich and penetrating as Dürer’s.
