Why I will never bother reading her

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

This passage, from a Time Literary Supplement review of a book about Stein & Toklas, is pretty amusing:

But just how “incomprehensible” is a work like The Making of Americans, Stein’s monumental, and largely unread, chef d’oeuvre? The sympathetic reader, the one who does not send the book windmilling across the room after finishing the first page, has two options. The first – which appears, incidentally, to have been the preferred tactic of Stein’s immediate circle – is simply to go with the flow of words, to luxuriate in a language unchecked by the stuffy conventions of realism or, for that matter, grammar. To use a trope Stein herself favoured, the words become the bold brushstrokes of a thoroughly modernist aesthetic, conveying moods, impressions and suggestions of form in place of narrative coherence or clear ideas. (While acolytes like Bernard Faÿ adored such airy expressionism, Picasso was apparently less indulgent – he was unable to sit through a reading of Stein’s “word portrait” of him, professing to its author that he couldn’t abide abstractions.)