The Last Folktale (book review)

Abstract

Balasaheb Labade has established himself as an experimental novelist from the publication of his first novel Pipilika Muktidham. This experimentation is used for expressing both content and form through an innovative narrative style. The Last Folktale is his third novel repeating, with a difference, the same narrative technique and literary style. This novel, created by using an amalgam of Magic Realism and Absurdist Fiction, has set aside all the conventional ideas of novel writing; as a result, readers have found it difficult to understand its content and form. It presents a highly effective picture of the disrupted world gone to pieces today and man’s meaningless existence by using strange images, miraculous folktales and by rereading mythological tales in a modern perspective.