Finnegans Wake gets illustrated (finally!)

A French blogger named Stephen Crowe is illustrating Finnegan’s Wake. Surprisingly, the images are not necessarily dream-like, and closely resemble the familiar cartoonishness of contemporary children’s books. It’s not nearly as trippy as, say, Mary Ellen Bute’s wonderful 1963 film adaptation of the book, or as startling, say, as Zak Smith’s zine-esque illustrations of every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. However, it’s an interesting project, especially insofar as it’s specific to the medium of the blog, and the whole thing is framed with a mildly charming aura of self-deprecation by the artist:

When I began this project, I wanted the look of the illustrations to take into account the book’s various incarnations—to appear variously as an illuminated manuscript, as the work of an obsessive artist, and as scavenged discoveries of the city dump. So that’s why my pictures look like garbage.