Season of migration to the north

虽然放进爱情书单里，但是这本书里爱情只是很小的一部分。更多的是殖民、反殖民、仇恨与自我身份的探索观察。

把它放进‘跨种族爱情（悲剧）’主要是因为看的时候觉得它有些方面和奥赛罗太像了。

An extremely difficult novel punctuated occasionally with a description or turn of phrase that stopped me cold. In an era of increasing confusion over national borders and immigration a book like this one is refreshing in the way it elevates the conversation.

This read like a parody of post-colonial fiction, maybe 80% atrocious and 20% passably insightful. It is hard to say what was more hackneyed, his observations about the colonized vs. the colonizer or his obsession with the white female body. Having just read War and Peace, I know that translation and time do not necessarily obscure great writing, and having read Naguib Mahfouz in the distant past, I think it is not necessarily a specific Arab-language writing thing. Maybe it sounds more poetic in the original language, but I doubt it.