In the freezing winter of 1520, Albrecht Dürer set off from Antwerp to a remote part of the Netherlands to paint a beached whale, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The German artist (pictured, in a 1498 self-portrait) travelled for six days; his ship was nearly wrecked. Upon reaching the shore, he found it deserted: “the great creature had sailed away”. In his magnificent new book, Philip Hoare uses this episode as a jumping-off point for “a trip of another kind entirely” – a “captivating journey” spanning centuries and genres, blending biography, art history, nature writing and memoir. Although it centres on Dürer’s life and work, Hoare summons up numerous other figures – from Luther and Shakespeare to David Bowie – and somehow makes them relevant to the Renaissance painter. A book of dazzling insight and “liquid beauty”, Albert & the Whale is Hoare’s “greatest work yet” – surpassing even the whale-focused Leviathan, for which he won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize.
In its readiness to “accommodate whatever disparate stuff comes its way”, Albert & the Whale often resembles a whale’s stomach, said Kathryn Murphy in the Literary Review. Its pages are packed with people, artworks and objects, and Hoare lengthily paraphrases other works of literature – from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus to W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (a strong influence on his book). This “scavenging” is a risky tactic, but it is in keeping with one of Hoare’s larger points, which is to remind us that “works are made from other matter”. In the Renaissance, he points out, the “tools of art and writing were goose quills, squid ink, rabbit-skin glue, ermine brushes”. In this “marvellous, unaccountable book”, Hoare continues this tradition.
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