Does any novel get off to a slower start than The Palace Walk?

Few books get off to a slower start that Naguib Mahfouz’s The Palace Walk (1956), the first volume of the trilogy most often cited as the masterwork of this Egyptian Nobelist. Well, there are other great books that start of slow and gradually, incrementally build a pace and interest as we come to know the characters, so I wwon’t give up on this after one night’s and 40 (small-type) pages – but I am also waiting for something, anything to happen. So far it’s just introduction of character and to a degree setting: one of the mansions in old Cairo (set during the first World War) that houses a large family: the imperious and even by the standards of his day chauvanistic patriarch, his demure and oppressed wife, the 5 children – the 2 sisters rivals one beautiful the other industrious – and the 3 brothers in varying degrees of rebellion against tradition and father, esp. the youngest – plus several devoted servants. The wife has almost literally never left the house in her 205 years of marriage, and the first chapter shows her gazing longingly at the city through the latticed windows that imprison her. The husband goes out drinking and carousing w/ his buddies literally every night. So all this is established in 40 pp – but it’s like a summary of a novel, a proposal for a novel – as nothing happens of import among the family members, there’s no immediate tension, plot, problem – the kind of thing we expect to launch a plot. The presence of Europeans, the English especially, in the city, hinted at a few times, appears to be a source of some tension and will probably drive an element of the story – and of course the degree to which wife and children will break free from the father and find their independence – an allegory perhaps of colonial and 3^rd world oppression and of Egypt emerging slowly into the modern age. Just don’t make it too slowly!