The Last Labyrinth won Arun Joshi the Sahitya Academy Award, India's most prestigious literary prize. Written in the first person, like The Foreigner and The Apprentice, it is an uncompromising search inside the deepest recesses of the human soul, hence one of the symbolic meanings the title acquires. The personal, intimate tone of the narrative, at times giving the reader the impression of a diary, suggests an autobiographical dimension: the protagonist, Som Bhaskar, is an industrialist like his creator. A sort of arrival point in the whole of Joshi's fiction, Som incarnates the quintessential male hero in the literary production of his author: intelligent, sensible, curious, self-centred, somewhat indrawn, well-educated, he is always in precarious balance between Hamlet-esque choices and divergent worlds which split his personality in two, his predicament mirrored in his very name:...
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Citation: Piciucco, Pier Paolo. "The Last Labyrinth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 February 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14905, accessed 05 December 2025.]
