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. 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 expresses 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.