I found the plot

I finished Palace Walk last night and in the last 100 pages or so I found the plot. It is indeed the story of a family, and how external events (the Egyptian independence moving following the Great War) threaten to tear a happy equilibrium apart.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and will definitely read the others in the trilogy. My main quibble with Mahfouz concerns his use of stream-of-consciousness when he enters the heads of his characters. It is a useful tool for showing their internal contradictions and how they rationalize them away - but sometimes the streams are so convoluted as to be almost unreadable. Juxtaposed against the rest of his prose, these passages can be jarring. (*In fairness, this could be the fault of the translation. If anyone reads Arabic and wants to find the book and let me know, I'd be curious to find out.)

Also, if you think you might like Mahfouz but aren't in the mood for a 500 page starter novel, I also recommend the slim Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth. Weighing in at less than 200 pages, you can get a taste of Mahfouz as well as a fascinating fictionalized account of a monotheistic pharoah and his beautiful wife Nefertiti.