RaveThe Guardian (UK)... 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.
