Funny in Farsi - Firoozeh Dumas

A lighthearted memoir, Funny in Farsi was the Deliberate Reader Book Club title for October's month-long discussion.  The author, Firoozeh Dumas (her father specifically told her not to mention her maiden name in the book, and then wondered why she hadn't used it once it was published) first came to the United States when she was seven, when her father had a two-year work assignment for the Iranian oil industry in California.  After returning to Iran, her family later came back to the United States to liver permanently.

Despite the cover claim that this is "A memoir of growing up Iranian in America," I felt like much of the book wasn't really about Dumas so much as it was about her larger family, with her serving kind of as an observer in the background.  Each "chapter" is really more like a little vignette focusing on a different incident, and there's also a pretty big jump from when Dumas was a child to when she was adult, with only one real chapter on her adolescence--one minute she's trying to get her mother to bake American snacks for her elementary school, and the next she's getting married.  Many of the stories focus explicitly on Dumas' father, something that she admits in the afterword of the book.  Her parents are definitely the center of this narrative; despite having brothers and an extended family, most of the stories involve her parents in the central role, whether it's her mother's accent and learning of English consisting mainly of watching The Price is Right or her father wanting to compete on a bowling game show, "fixing" up the house on his own, or trying on her engagement ring when her boyfriend asked her father's permission to marry her.

Obviously, the humor here is in the clash of cultures that comprises Dumas' life.  While her family is eager to embrace much of American culture, they're still baffled by other parts of it--such as why Americans like turkey.  And then, once Dumas marries a Frenchman, yet another aspect of culture clash enters her life.  To some degree, Dumas presents herself as better than the others around her--better at adjusting, better at understanding, just better, which is a little self-centered, even more so than writing a memoir about your experiences.  (And she is correct that you don't need to have done something amazing to write a memoir about your life.)  Maybe it's that she's more pragmatic than other people in her life, maybe it's a skewed viewpoint; it's hard to say.  However, it's still an amusing read, though one that, like many memoirs, you probably need to take with a grain of salt.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read, but it's one that lacks a lot of depth.  Rather than really digging into any issue, light or heavy, Dumas instead skims over pretty much everything, keeping the focus away from herself.  I would have liked to see a little more depth here in some respect; depth doesn't mean that something has to be depressing, but it would have made the book seem a little more whole-hearted; as it was, it just felt a bit shallow.

3 stars out of 5.