The Bohemians
A Novel
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4.3 • 55 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring.
“Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers an intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression, and their impact on humanity.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things
In this novel of the glittering and gritty Jazz Age, a young aspiring photographer named Dorothea Lange arrives in San Francisco in 1918. As a newcomer—and naïve one at that—Dorothea is grateful for the fast friendship of Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, who introduces Dorothea to Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened and she grows into the artist whose iconic Depression-era “Migrant Mother” photograph broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation.
A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, The Bohemians captures a cast of unforgettable characters, including Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. But moreover, it shows how the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Darznik returns after Song of a Captive Bird, about Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, with another portrait of a historical creative woman, this time photographer Dorothea Lange. As things open in 1918, Dorothea has left her native New Jersey at 23 with the intention to travel to Mexico, but gets stranded in San Francisco after being robbed. There, she quickly establishes herself as a portraitist, taking photographs of San Francisco's rich and powerful while befriending members of the city's artistic class. Darznik's primary aim is to reclaim the figure of Lange's Chinese assistant, whose name has been lost to history. Here, she's Caroline Lee, a passionate fashion designer who introduces Dorothea to other artists and supports her work. Lee's increasing vulnerability to post-WWI xenophobia open Dorothea's eyes to a variety of injustices, and eventually Dorothea schemes with another photographer to help Lee. Darznik is adept at depicting Dorothea's evolving worldview as well as San Francisco a decade after the earthquake, a "world of raw possibility," especially for women artists (at least until they marry). Less successful are the novel's largely superfluous closing chapter and epilogue, which gloss over the following decades of Lange's life and more familiar photographic work. Still, Darznik's rich and rewarding introduction to Lange's early milieu makes this worthwhile.
