Balasaheb Labade’s The Last Folktale (Translated by Vilas Salunke)
Reviewed by
Bhaskar Hande,
The Hague, Netherlands.
The Last Folktale | Novel | Balasaheb
Labade | Translated by Vilas Salunke |
Authorspress, 2025, INR 268, pp. 495
The Last Folktale, by Balasaheb Labade,
translated in English by Vilas Salunke, is created by using an amalgam of Magic
realism and Absurdist fiction, setting aside all the conventional ideas of
novel writing. No wonder, readers find it difficult to understand and interpret
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 and reinterpreting mythological
tales in a modern perspective.
The alter-ego of the novelist—an
uninvited narrator—comes in the novel quite often portraying different
characters. A Pegasus-like winged horse repeatedly comes into the narrator’s
dream; the narrator’s visits to the crematoriums owing to his friendship with a
boy named Kachrya who is elated when corpses are brought for cremation—such
absurdist events, anecdotes, stories and folktales underline the breakdown of
life, lack of communication and meaninglessness of human relations.
Though the content and characters are
rooted in the Indian soil, the realistic threads are left loose so as to let
the reader look upon it as a folktale of contemporary life. The author presents
these aspects of life through the style of absurdist fiction to bewilder and
confuse the readers, indirectly making them think deeply about the purpose of
the strange narrative used in the novel. The author juxtaposes traditional
folktales and horror stories full of spirits and ghosts with tales from Greek
mythology. This is done in order to go deep into the subconscious and
unconscious narratives of the narrators and characters in the novel to reach up
to the hidden forest of the primordial urges and impulses in the human mind and
exhibit the unnatural forces functioning therein. Sometimes there are sexual
urges or unsatiated inspirations to dominate other persons.
Thus, through the use of magic realism, when the author reveals a terrifying picture of twisted, disjointed and unsatiated sexual desires, the reader is stunned and dumbfounded.