El laberinto

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El laberinto
Author Manuel Mujica Laínez
Country Argentina
Language Spanish
Genre(s) Novel
Publication date 1974
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)

El Laberinto (Spanish for "The Labyrinth") is a 1974 novel by Manuel Mujica Laínez.

It purports to tell the story of "Ginés de Silva", the boy shown holding a torch in the lower left-hand corner of El Greco's 1586 painting The Burial of Count Orgaz.

This picaresque Bildungsroman presents, with virtuosic gusto, a rich and highly amusing series of pictures from the boy's Seville childhood in the 1570s to the old man's death in early colonial Argentina in the 1650s. Thus it connects, somehow, its author's Renaissance-preocupied novels (Bomarzo; El unicornio) with which it forms a kind of trilogy, with Mujica Laínez' Buenos Aires cycle.

As usual with Manuel Mujica Laínez, the main love-story in this novel involves a same-sex relationship.