A Rock & A Hard Place

There's a great cliche about "being stuck between a rock & a hard place."
But I am stuck between Five Women & Everyman. Were the women to literally exist in flesh and bone, then life would be very exciting.
Such, however, is not the case.



Five Women is but a paper product, on loan from the Long Beach Library, and Everyman is the name of a New Jersey jewelry store.

PHILIP ROTH is one of the most prolific and respected American novelists. Portnoy's Complaint is a Twentieth Century American classic. His Nathan Zuckerman stories elevate intellectual whining to an art. The Breast is more novella than novel but like Our Gang, it is underbellied with a twisted humor.

ROBERT MUSIL has been blogged here and there. But someone more knowledgeable than me had this to say about the Austrian-born writer:

His masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, is drenched from start to finish in ideas. Imagine [Dostoevski's] "Grand Inquisitor" to the power of ten, and you
have some idea of the tone of this massive work. For more than a thousand pages,the theories and hypotheses, the aphorisms and paradoxes, the points and counterpoints...pour out, in an overwhelming torrent. If the novel of ideas ever comes back into favor, Musil will probably rise from his second tier status – today he is sort of poor man’s Joyce or Proust – and be acknowledged as a great, instead of a near-great, author.

For the past two weeks, I have been pingponging between Everyman and Five Women.
This quote is from the opening scene of Roth's book. To the gathered mourners at a freeway-friendly cemetery, the brother of the deceased has just described:

With such painstaking precision...The world as it innocently existed before the invention of death, life perpetual in their father-created Eden, a paradise just fifteen feet wide by forty feet deep disguised as an old-style jewelry store...

This quote is from Musil's The Lady From Portugal:

Just as no one had ever yet reached the place where the rainbow ends, so too, they recounted, no one yet had ever succeeded in looking out over these great stone walls: there were always more walls beyond, and between them there were ravines like outspread blankets full of stones, stones as big as a house, and even the finest gravel underfoot was no smaller than a man's head.

I read Roth and it feels like my brain is taking a ride in a Cadillac. But a Cadillac can be a hearse. Then I read Musil and we are in a Mercedes. But a Mercedes can be...