Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: novel trivializes terrorism, political unrest, and art

Even before September 11, I would have found this novel--with its stock characters (South American terrorists, Japanese businessman, banana republic politicians) somehwere between offensive and dull. Though the author is a wonderful writer, her use of stereotypes and central casting characters and settings ultimately trivializes what could have been an interesting fictional meditation on the power of art. The smugness, insularity, and the connotative shortcuts could only have been written by an American for whom issues such as beauty, justice, and culture are not life-and-death (literally or figuratively) issues.