Two young poets in 1970s Mexico City found a literary movement called visceral realism, then disappear into the Sonoran Desert searching for a lost avant-garde poet. Bolaño structures the novel as a constellation of voices: testimonies from everyone who encountered them across decades and continents. The result is a portrait of a generation, of Latin American literature, of the utopian dreams of the seventies and their destruction. Bolaño wrote it knowing he was dying, and the urgency shows. The poets are never found. The search is the point.