The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (1998)

The diary of a seventeen-year-old begins it: Juan García Madero ditches his law lectures, falls in with a gang of avant-garde poets called the visceral realists, and spends the winter of 1975 in Mexico City convinced that poetry, sex, and staying up all night are the only serious uses of a life. Then the book does something almost cruel. Its two ringleaders, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, walk out into the Sonoran desert after a poet who vanished fifty years earlier, and for hundreds of pages we glimpse them only sideways, through the testimony of dozens who knew them across two decades and four continents, the way you'd know a fire only by its smoke. What Bolaño is really tracking is what the world does to the young who give everything to literature: they drift to the edges of other people's stories and grow unknowable even to the friends who loved them most. Read it for the winter when anything still seemed possible, then read on as that winter recedes into legend.