The Last Folktale

The Last Folktale, created by using an amalgam of Magic realism and Absurdist fiction, has set 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.