This project analyses how the textual strategies deployed by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño contribute to a critical (re)framing of neoliberal modernity. To do this, it proposes an understanding of Bolaño’s fiction through ‘the labyrinthine mode’: a literary poetics that replicates the effects of trying to navigate a labyrinth. Not only is the labyrinth metaphor consistently used to describe Bolaño’s fiction, it also has a rich cultural heritage within Latin American literature more generally. For instance, in the work of Bolaño’s predecessors – immortalised under the banner of the Latin American boom – the labyrinth was synonymous with national solitude and the struggle to achieve modernity, particularly as a result of the legacies of colonialism. Bolaño’s labyrinthine mode represents a challenge to this escape-driven narrative. Writing in the wake of the dictatorial instalment of neoliberalism in his native Chile and beyond, Bolaño posits the labyrinth as an inescapable structure that also operates within the space-time of the globalised present. In doing this, he prepares the ground for an immanent critique of neoliberal modernity – a critique that foregrounds the networks of violence that underpin late capitalism whilst simultaneously establishing narrative and affective lines of flight through which hope may emerge.