I've been reading Gertrude Stein's 'Picasso' to while away the evenings in my hotel this week. It's quite something: a highly personal and insightful description of Picasso's life and work (at least up to the 1930s). It's also a triumph of style: plain, direct and yet with a clever use of punctuation, mainly using commas where you'd expect a full-stop, that throws you slightly, and makes you read more carefully. Her comments and asides on art, history and psychology are masterful:

"The spirit of everybody is changed, of a whole people is changed, but mostly nobody knows it, and a war forces them to recognise it because during a war the appearance of everything changes very much quicker, but really the whole change has been accomplished, and a war is only something which forces eveyone to recognise it. The French revolution was over when war forced everybody to recognise it, the American revolution was accomplished before the war, the war is only a publicity agent which makes everyone know what has happened, yes, it is that."

That final "yes, it is that" clinches it: giving the impression that she is talking to herself, that she has just realised something as she speaks/writes.