... 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.
An antic and original creation, it is not exactly a biography of the revolutionary Renaissance printmaker, painter and theorist of geometry and perspective ... Instead, Hoare has made a book as much for Dürer as it is about him. Dürer’s life and art are thrillingly encountered. But imagine writing a letter to a brilliant friend containing a portrait of them, filling the gaps between you with imaginative companionship ... No reader will forget studying the ‘Apocalypse’, ‘Melancolia,’ the ‘Angel’, the rhino or the self-portraits in Hoare’s company. Following him between them is deliberately dizzying ... Hoare abandons familiar conventions of non-fiction for a carnival of polymathic cross-reference, fantasy and structure by association. Then, regularly and carefully, the whirl stills and we stand in communion with the artist ... Hoare moves beyond his own hand, which has hitherto brought hybrid biographies, memoirs and tremendous books on the sea and whales, to make something reckless, marvellous and unforgettable. Dürer would have loved it. So will you.
... an ecstatic romp through several centuries of art, literature, and natural history. The name Dürer might conjure images of dark, narrow streets and half-timbered houses in old German towns, ancient Gothic script, and woodcuts so finely executed they take forever to figure out. Mr. Hoare gives us instead a thoroughly modern Dürer, a dreamer, a visionary, our contemporary ... Mr. Hoare’s most experimental work to date, there is water everywhere, and the great mystery of life remains intact. Sometimes Mr. Hoare might dispense a little too quickly with knowable things: There are mistakes in his quotations ... Yet I doubt that any other writer has grasped so deeply the feral, sensual undercurrent of Dürer’s art or has felt so acutely the artist’s attunement to the fierce animals that live in his works ... Mr. Hoare’s book is best read as a fiendishly erudite daydream, in which there are no boundaries and anything becomes possible. The author invites the reader to step inside his capacious mind, a place so magical that Albrecht Dürer may fuse with his 19th-century admirer Oscar Wilde ... It is perhaps Dürer’s greatest achievement (and now also Mr. Hoare’s) to have shown us that this fantastical world is not so strange after all, that, in its fearsome splendor, it must be ours too.
Where the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning Leviathan was a genre-bending but still informative work of nonfiction, Albert and the Whale is yet more visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives. Hoare moves nimbly between the stories of people who came before and after Dürer, but share his 'unity of perception; which encompassed aspects of 'art, science and natural philosophy' ... there is the sense he’s seeing how allusive he can make his subjects’ lives — how much he can heighten them by bringing them into contact with each other and with Dürer. This harmonious and enviably conceived book manages it with full marks ... This book captures the wonder Dürer may have felt on his way to the whale he missed: 'Something so fantastic could not survive being seen.'
... a very Sebaldian new book ... At the end of this enlightening book Hoare holds a lock of Dürer’s hair in his hand, preserved as a relic. It is another item for his own mental Wunderkammer; a small thing, but as wondrous in its way as a whale, a rhinoceros or one of the artist’s miraculous pictures.
Neither straight art history nor a preachy eco-Doomsday book, it contains elements of both, and a lot more besides ... If Albert and the Whale were a room, it would be an alchemist’s laboratory with a stuffed crocodile suspended from the ceiling, full of freaks and fascinations, reef-encrusted in time. More prose poem than straight prose, its language is intoxicated ... Another problem is that while the author weaves a huge number of quotations into the text, he puts nothing in quotation marks. There are no footnotes, so if you want to check his facts and sources you have to go to a referencing web page set up by the publisher which, when I was writing this review, was not up ... But I quibble. If you are prepared to enter the dream and leave drear nit-picking behind, Hoare’s lush imaginings sweep you through 500 years on a sea of connections. Be warned – it’s a depressing ride. Love of the sea is nothing else than love of death, said Thomas Mann, who loved to quote Prospero: 'My ending is despair.' You understand why Dürer’s angel looks so grumpy.
This is a headbanger of a book. Albrecht Dürer is on the cover but the digressions on whales and the wild swimming the author does at the drop of his bike if there is a bit of sea, river or lake nearby are bloody annoying ... It should be brilliantly illustrated. The figures work reasonably enough but the many black and white photos are often very poor and mostly without captions – like something out of a pre-computer college magazine short on letraset. The colour images are not integrated but at the back of the book. The publisher could surely have afforded a few florins extra rather than palming readers off with their own and the author’s websites ... All the more frustrating as Hoare’s prose scintillates, probes and twists, his descriptive power marvellously concise and encapsulating.
... evocatively associative ... Hoare’s deep and illuminating responses to Dürer’s iconic self-portraits and empathic portraits of animals inspire questions of sexuality and of our use and abuse of other species, especially whales. His narrative swerves also deliver incisive profiles of writers influenced by Dürer, including art historian Erwin Panofsky and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, both refugees from Nazi Germany, and poet Marianne Moore. Hoare also vividly celebrates Dürer’s standing as the first international art star due to his revolutionary, 'almost uncanny,' mass-produced woodcuts and engravings. In contemplating Dürer’s virtuoso skills and gripping 'vision of the dark, the beautiful, and the strange' and sharing his own immersive appreciation of nature and art, Hoare forges a new, reorienting, and exhilarating perspective.
... features striking renditions of the artist’s popular paintings and sketches, but the text is florid and often difficult to follow, jumping from analyses of Dürer’s artwork to lengthy discussions of other individuals with little apparent connection to the artist. Furthermore, Hoare doesn’t include clear attributions when quoting the artist, and the connection between the artist and a whale, as indicated by the book’s title, is exaggerated ... For fans of art history, the portions of the book directly related to Dürer and how his interactions with nature influenced his art are fascinating ... An intermittently intriguing yet baroque investigation of an artist that leaves readers wanting more.
