Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Pale compared to The White Hotel

Like others who've offered their reviews, this book was recommended highly to me by a friend. Perhaps if I had not already read The White Hotel, another novel by a poet with the holocaust as a theme, my opinion of this book would have been higher, but where the White Hotel successfully bridges the poetic and the narative, Fugitive Pieces fails.I was unconvinced by the endless parade of quasi-poetic aphorisms: "Every moment is two moments." "Complicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant." "There's no absence if there remains even the memory of absence."The author does not let the reader judge the meaning of the scattered recollections that make up this book, but insists on stating the meaning explicitly. I found this alienating, and I never felt at all immersed in this book.I do strongly recommend D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, however.