Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas

For a book that is less than 200 pages, it certainly took me a while to trudge through this one.  Consciously, I'm telling myself that I enjoyed it because I really wanted to feel connected to the author and her experiences in some way.  Memoirs are one of my favorite genres, and I was really routing for this one.  But deep within the cogs and gears spinning inside my subconscious, I know that I really wasn't that into this book and didn't quite grasp its purpose and intent.

Funny in Farsi is a somewhat funny memoir about Firoozeh Dumas's immigration to Whittier, California from Iran when she was seven years old.  The chapters of the book serve more as a series of short stories rather than a cohesive flow from one event to the next.  Some of the chapters are so disjointed that I felt like I was putting together an impossible tangram puzzle in an attempt to make sense of its pattern and where it would eventually lead me.  I also had difficulty connecting to the author.  Aside from the fact that she has certainly led a much more privileged life than I have, and aside from the fact that we are both women, I could not find a common, solid link between us.

Although the book was generally a bust for me, there were some stories that made me laugh.  Her trip to Disney Land where she gets separated from her family, for example, was pretty hillarious.  Unfortunately, most of the other stories just did not resonate with me.  Like any other book or piece of literature, our own personal experiences play heavily on whether or not we love it, hate it, or just don't care for it.  I have to say that this was one that I just didn't care for.