Philip Hoare - Albert & the Whale

Contents

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2021

Copyright Philip Hoare 2021

Philip Hoare asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extracts from Herman Melville by W. H. Auden from Collected Poems (Faber & Faber Ltd, 1994) Copyright 1976 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Extracts from Herman Melville, copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; and Thanksgiving for a Habitat: VIII: Grub First, Then Ethics, copyright 1963 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1991 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Extracts from Marianne Moores New Collected Poems,

(Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017) by permission of Faber & Faber.

Cover images: Jan (Johan) Wierix, Pottwal-Herde, gestrandet bei Ter Heide in November 1577, engraving, private collection.
Cover design by Julian Humphries

Albrecht Drer Muse du Louvre,

Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Angle Dequier

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008323325

Ebook Edition July 2020 ISBN: 9780008323301

Version: 2022-01-13

Always original Always pushing from somewhere new

Olivia Laing, author of Everybody

This magnificent new book a captivating journey through art and life, nature and human nature, biography and personal memoir 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 his greatest work yet

Laura Cumming, The Observer

Philip Hoare, best know for Leviathan, his discursive and personal book about whales, has written a very Sebaldian new book. In it, he traverses his own patch and sniffs out an assortment of seemingly unrelated themes Albrecht Drer, cetaceans, Thomas Mann, a deformation of the hand, the death of his mother and proceeds to reveal the single degree of separation between them Enlightening

Michael Prodger, Sunday Times

Visionary: a tone poem put together from the lives of others, with detailed use of archives In Albert and the Whale there is the sense hes 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 Drer. This harmonious and enviably conceived book manages it with full marks

Jonathon McAloon, Financial Times

This beautifully eclectic book is so much more than a biography of the great artist. This is a book to immerse. Like the sea in which its author swims daily, it braces and embraces. It beckons us ever on

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

Its a summary-defying blend of art history, biography, nature writing and memoir You can feel the delight Hoare 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. Somehow, Hoares 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. Albert and the Whale will pull you in like the tide

John Williams, The New York Times

In his typically allusive and impish style, Hoare has unfurled a whole tapestry of lives connected to Drers work and its themes. He extrapolates an entire cosmology, a way of seeing the world every bit as rich and penetrating as Drers

Charles Arrowsmith, Washington Post

More slippery than a straight biography, the book instead swoops cormorant-like into Drers life and times. Albert and the Whale glitters with arresting details

The Economist

A masterpiece, a riot, a meditation, an illumination and most definitely, for reasons that will be apparent when you live inside its pages, a day at the beach

Simon Schama, Financial Times

For Lilian and Freddie

Some years ago, I visited a friend and his monkeys in a converted church on the outskirts of a city in New England. It was February; there was snow on the ground. The address he gave me lay outside the centre, somewhere beyond the historic trail and gracious brick houses. I had to take the subway there, and I came out the way you do, not knowing which way to go.

The street was wind-blown, lined with a few stores and nondescript dwellings that may or may not have housed people. My friend met me at reception and took me up to his office. There was nothing remarkable about it, except that he shared it with primates other than those of our own species.