From the New Republic's review of Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

It is thus a kind of blank, and forms a pair with his other metaphysical crutch, the name he gives to evil in the cosmic sense: "the abyss." This is a venerable trope in modern thought, typically employed with a great deal of self-pity and a great want of precision. Bolano sometimes uses it to mean death or oblivion, and 2666 is pockmarked with pits and craters and mineshafts and ravines, images of the grave. But as is often the case, he also wants to make it stand for something more. For all his hardheadedness, Bolano is not immune to the Ibero-American tendency towards spiritual bombast. Death is just death, but to speak of oblivion as an abyss is to give it a spurious glamour, while to talk of "the abyss"--the abyss that we are all dancing on the edge of, or tragically circling, or whatever--is to seek to recover the Christian Hell, in all its metaphysical significance, under a different name. The idea, like the thing itself, is empty.

Perhaps I am carrying modernist expectations to a postmodern work.

Heh. The empty empties. Das Nichts nichtet. The point is not to bridge, leap, or otherwise avoid falling in the abyss, but to understand it. And poets are our spelunkers.  ¶ 9:14 PM