An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around Rugendas' trips to Argentina where he strived to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. A brief and dramatic visit to the pampas gives him the chance to fulfill his ambition but a strange episode that he cannot avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly marks him for life.

Preface by Roberto Bolaño.