The Cairo Trilogy
Three volumes (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) spanning three generations of a Cairo family from WWI to WWII. Mahfouz proved that Arabic literature could sustain the full weight of the 19th-century European realist tradition while being entirely its own thing. He became the first Arabic-language Nobel laureate in 1988, largely on this work's strength.
Fourteen hundred pages, and the women in them are "almost always cartoonish," described by looks and virtue while every man gets an interior. Kamal is the worst offender on pacing, since he "brings every scene to a halt with his inner observations," circling the same infatuation with Aida for chapters. Yasin's affairs repeat without revealing. The opening hundred pages of domestic detail lose readers before the family drama takes hold, and "the slow pace and intensely irritating male characters" finish the job for others. The later political material names real parties and officials without annotation: books that "throw too many names around" at readers who do not already know 1930s Egypt.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
