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.