Genre Fiction
![Jasmin Darznik - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B003ZWBZBI.jpg)
The Bohemians: A Novel
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.
"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.
Editorial Reviews
"If you loved Song of a Captive Bird like I did, you will want to read the latest creative historical biography by Jasmin Darznik. Darznik paints an illuminative portrait of the photographer and the woman."-Ms. Magazine
"Lange's story begins when she arrives in 1918 San Francisco . . . spinning into an all-too relevant tale of a woman dealing with a pandemic, rising anti-immigration sentiment, and a tumultuous political climate."-PopSugar
"In her riveting and resonant new novel, Jasmin Darznik captures San Francisco's heyday through the eyes of one of its most iconic residents. By exploring how Dorothea Lange witnessed her troubled and momentous times, Darznik speaks directly to our own."-Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
"You'll never look at a Dorothea Lange photograph the same way after reading Darznik's compelling portrait of the trailblazer who carved a glorious path through 1920s San Francisco. Darznik doesn't flinch when confronting the parallels to today, whether racism or anti-immigrant sentiment, yet her impeccable research grounds the story firmly in the heyday of the Jazz Age. A superb read."-Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue
"Dorothea Lange once famously said, ‘Art is an act of total attention.' Jasmin Darznik's breathtaking novel The Bohemians accomplishes that and more. Not only did it have me riveted from start to finish, through her words, history powerfully speaks to the present moment."-Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept
"A beautiful literary portrait of the one and only Dorothea Lange. Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers in this intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression's impact on humanity. Highly readable and utterly relevant to our times. I was transported."-Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things
"Historical readers will treasure this engaging story . . . Darznik deftly depic...
"Lange's story begins when she arrives in 1918 San Francisco . . . spinning into an all-too relevant tale of a woman dealing with a pandemic, rising anti-immigration sentiment, and a tumultuous political climate."-PopSugar
"In her riveting and resonant new novel, Jasmin Darznik captures San Francisco's heyday through the eyes of one of its most iconic residents. By exploring how Dorothea Lange witnessed her troubled and momentous times, Darznik speaks directly to our own."-Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
"You'll never look at a Dorothea Lange photograph the same way after reading Darznik's compelling portrait of the trailblazer who carved a glorious path through 1920s San Francisco. Darznik doesn't flinch when confronting the parallels to today, whether racism or anti-immigrant sentiment, yet her impeccable research grounds the story firmly in the heyday of the Jazz Age. A superb read."-Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue
"Dorothea Lange once famously said, ‘Art is an act of total attention.' Jasmin Darznik's breathtaking novel The Bohemians accomplishes that and more. Not only did it have me riveted from start to finish, through her words, history powerfully speaks to the present moment."-Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept
"A beautiful literary portrait of the one and only Dorothea Lange. Jasmin Darznik expertly delivers in this intriguing glimpse into the woman behind those unforgettable photographs of the Great Depression's impact on humanity. Highly readable and utterly relevant to our times. I was transported."-Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things
"Historical readers will treasure this engaging story . . . Darznik deftly depic...
Readers Top Reviews
Kindle
I enjoyed that although there are many men who are part of this story, the novel revolves around one key female friendship and many, many supportive women characters. As a young woman in the 1920s, it doesn't seem that Dorry Lange could have become Dorothea, the iconic artist and social commentator that she was without her eclectic group of friends and nascent San Francisco, which is always reinventing itself. Many social issues that are still being dealt with were quite alive in young California. At least the last candidate to promote racism did not have the nerve to proclaim "Keep California (America) White." Such messages are slightly more hidden in today's politics. The novel is a beautifully crafted time capsule. Dorothea's transition from a naive but adventurous young lady to a mature spokesperson for the unseen is fascinating.
Staci Greason Aut
Jasmin Darznik's work of historical fiction is an absolute treat to read. I honestly didn't want it to end. The roaring 20s imagined through the life of yet-famous photographer Dorothea Lange. I've always been moved by Lange's Depression-Era work. This is a novel about how she became that woman. A naive, but talented young photographer, Dorothea Lange, arrives in San Francisco in 1918 determined to create a life for herself. In spite of a waning World War, a growing flu epidemic, social/political unrest, and being a single woman, Lange thrives. Much of her early success was due to the support of other female San Francisco artists, especially her new friend, a talented, vivacious, seamstress. Caroline Lee. I deeply appreciate that the author took the time to also create a full life for Caroline Lee, a Chinese American, since little was recorded of the actual young woman and the challenges she must have faced during that era. On these pages, Lee gets to have her story imagined with depth and love. All of the characters are so fully drawn, even the city of San Francisco, which I've always loved, vibrates with energy and life. We meet everyone from Ansel Adams to D.H. Lawrence. It's a blast. And the voice of Dorothea rings honest and true. Making it very hard to leave her on the final page.
TarheelsStaci Gre
If you haven’t heard me gush about it before, Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik is one of my very favorites. It’s an immersive and important work highlighting the life of Forugh, a poet living in Iran during the revolution. I cherished reading it, and I cherished The Bohemians just as much. I was fortunate to buddy read this stunning book about friendship. The Bohemians is set mostly in San Francisco a decade after the earthquake that greatly altered the city. Dorothea Lange, newly arrived aspiring photographer, has used all her money to travel to San Francisco with a dream for a better, more independent life. She is robbed almost immediately and has nowhere to sleep, no family or friends. Her luck turns around when she meets Caroline Lee on a streetcar. The rapport between the two develops into the most loving and supportive friendship, just as Dorrie’s career begins to likewise develop. Oh my gosh, did I love the San Francisco bohemian setting for this novel. I followed along on Jasmin Darznik’s page as she was writing. Check out all the pictures she shared of Bohemian life, furniture, jewelry; it’s all so interesting and stunning. I loved the cameos by artists like Frida Kahlo and Ansel Adams. I really loved it all. The Bohemians transported me to a new time and place, and the friendship at the heart of the story was a refreshing take on the special bond between these two strong female characters. Darznik writes with my favorite buttery, precise style, and I cannot get enough. I hope she has many more stories to share with us. The Bohemians is without a doubt one of my favorites this year. I received a gifted copy from the publisher but also preordered another copy.
Lisa PoulsonTarhe
It felt eerily perfect to read this novel right now, sitting in my apartment in San Francisco - beset by pandemic, resurgent anti-Asian violence and the memories of the capital riot. You could say that Jasmin Darznik’s timing was lucky, releasing this book when the conditions of our lives are so similar, but I think it's so much deeper than that. She wrote about what she was called to express about society in the first part of the 20th century. Here in the first part of the 21st, this novel about two exceptional women (one real, one imagined) is a beautifully relevant story. I saw Dorothea and Caroline as twin heroines, each courageous, pioneering and so real. To read history enlivened through Jasmin’s eye is such a gift.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1.
Lady photographer and Oriental girl capture San Francisco's heart.
There's a picture of us that ran in the paper in 1918. In it we're standing side by side, me with my Graflex around my neck and Caroline with a smile that dares you to look elsewhere. She's wearing a tunic with long, bell-shaped sleeves and a thick satin strap cinched at her waist. It's a kind of costume, and so is my outfit: flowy crushed-velvet dress, stacks of silver bangles, a long paisley scarf. We both have bobbed hair, except that mine's a mass of dark-blond curls and hers is black and sleek. There's a glint in Caroline's kohl-rimmed eyes, but it's a black-and-white picture, so you can't see their color, which was the color of cut glass.
Whenever I saw this picture in the years that followed, I was immediately transported back to our studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco-or 540, as we'd called it. As if it was still just the two of us, Caroline and me, so lit up with hope and so at home. We'd both gone so long thinking we had no place in the world that we couldn't imagine belonging to anything but each other. By the time that picture was taken, the studio had become our home, the home we built through grit and sheer will. We worked eighteen-hour days, Monday to Saturday. Exhausted as we always were, we loved it, every minute of it, but if there was a time we loved more than any other, it was those nights when our friends streamed down from Monkey Block. Everybody brought everybody, and 540 filled with music and dancing and brilliant talk.
Within two years all that ended and I was on my own again.
After the scandal broke and Caroline disappeared, I'd see the whole story come into focus in a single frame. What happened. What I could never undo. I'd see Caroline sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to her chin, head bowed. I'd see her lifting her eyes and fixing me with a distant, unblinking gaze. I'd see the shadow on her cheek that would deepen to purple by morning.
If only I could have picked up my Graflex, flipped open the lens, and taken a picture, there would have been some kind of proof. But I couldn't do it. I loved her so much, and in that moment I couldn't bring myself to capture her pain. Still, the story was in every picture I took afterward, in the ones people talked about and remembered, but also in the ones that were hidden, destroyed, or forgotten. Especially those. It's the image that never varies or fades, even though I'm the only one who knows it's there.
To take a truly good picture you have to learn to see, not just look. I once said a camera can teach you that, but the truth is that sometimes it only gets in the way. The realization was born that night. This many years later, it takes me back to San Francisco, to a portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street, to a ravaged darkroom where one story ended and another one began.
The first and most important thing that happened to me when I got to San Francisco was that I learned what it felt like to be alone and penniless, to have no tie to the world but fear, hunger, and need. That's where it all started for me.
I set out in the spring of 1918. I was nearly twenty-three, eager and restless, with just-bobbed hair. I had all sorts of ideas of who and how and where I wanted to be. I'd scrimped for two years to save the hundred and forty-two dollars folded inside my wallet. Two years of hand-sewn dresses, borrowed books, lunch pails of leftover mackerel or canned beans on stale black bread, but I'd done it. I'd seen my last East Coast winter. Nothing could hold me there any longer.
I sailed from New Jersey in a steamer, traveled five days down to New Orleans in a third-class berth, then another twelve days across the country by train. I'd been saving up to go to Paris, but with the war on there was no chance of that. My plan now was to spend a few weeks in San Francisco, then head south to Mexico. The details fell off from there, but I figured I'd just keep going until my money ran out, and when there was no farther I could go, I'd work out what came next.
I carried my camera in a case that hung to my hips. There'd been little else to keep and even less I cared to hold on to. On my lap sat a battered leather valise I'd picked up in a thrift shop before leaving home. It held a half dozen rolls of fresh film, a pencil and sketchbook, a few days' change of clothes, a toiletry kit, and a secondhand copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence.
The train was crowded and noisy; the food was terrible and cost too much. For days I was tired and hungry, my body was stiff from trying to ...
Lady photographer and Oriental girl capture San Francisco's heart.
There's a picture of us that ran in the paper in 1918. In it we're standing side by side, me with my Graflex around my neck and Caroline with a smile that dares you to look elsewhere. She's wearing a tunic with long, bell-shaped sleeves and a thick satin strap cinched at her waist. It's a kind of costume, and so is my outfit: flowy crushed-velvet dress, stacks of silver bangles, a long paisley scarf. We both have bobbed hair, except that mine's a mass of dark-blond curls and hers is black and sleek. There's a glint in Caroline's kohl-rimmed eyes, but it's a black-and-white picture, so you can't see their color, which was the color of cut glass.
Whenever I saw this picture in the years that followed, I was immediately transported back to our studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco-or 540, as we'd called it. As if it was still just the two of us, Caroline and me, so lit up with hope and so at home. We'd both gone so long thinking we had no place in the world that we couldn't imagine belonging to anything but each other. By the time that picture was taken, the studio had become our home, the home we built through grit and sheer will. We worked eighteen-hour days, Monday to Saturday. Exhausted as we always were, we loved it, every minute of it, but if there was a time we loved more than any other, it was those nights when our friends streamed down from Monkey Block. Everybody brought everybody, and 540 filled with music and dancing and brilliant talk.
Within two years all that ended and I was on my own again.
After the scandal broke and Caroline disappeared, I'd see the whole story come into focus in a single frame. What happened. What I could never undo. I'd see Caroline sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to her chin, head bowed. I'd see her lifting her eyes and fixing me with a distant, unblinking gaze. I'd see the shadow on her cheek that would deepen to purple by morning.
If only I could have picked up my Graflex, flipped open the lens, and taken a picture, there would have been some kind of proof. But I couldn't do it. I loved her so much, and in that moment I couldn't bring myself to capture her pain. Still, the story was in every picture I took afterward, in the ones people talked about and remembered, but also in the ones that were hidden, destroyed, or forgotten. Especially those. It's the image that never varies or fades, even though I'm the only one who knows it's there.
To take a truly good picture you have to learn to see, not just look. I once said a camera can teach you that, but the truth is that sometimes it only gets in the way. The realization was born that night. This many years later, it takes me back to San Francisco, to a portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street, to a ravaged darkroom where one story ended and another one began.
The first and most important thing that happened to me when I got to San Francisco was that I learned what it felt like to be alone and penniless, to have no tie to the world but fear, hunger, and need. That's where it all started for me.
I set out in the spring of 1918. I was nearly twenty-three, eager and restless, with just-bobbed hair. I had all sorts of ideas of who and how and where I wanted to be. I'd scrimped for two years to save the hundred and forty-two dollars folded inside my wallet. Two years of hand-sewn dresses, borrowed books, lunch pails of leftover mackerel or canned beans on stale black bread, but I'd done it. I'd seen my last East Coast winter. Nothing could hold me there any longer.
I sailed from New Jersey in a steamer, traveled five days down to New Orleans in a third-class berth, then another twelve days across the country by train. I'd been saving up to go to Paris, but with the war on there was no chance of that. My plan now was to spend a few weeks in San Francisco, then head south to Mexico. The details fell off from there, but I figured I'd just keep going until my money ran out, and when there was no farther I could go, I'd work out what came next.
I carried my camera in a case that hung to my hips. There'd been little else to keep and even less I cared to hold on to. On my lap sat a battered leather valise I'd picked up in a thrift shop before leaving home. It held a half dozen rolls of fresh film, a pencil and sketchbook, a few days' change of clothes, a toiletry kit, and a secondhand copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence.
The train was crowded and noisy; the food was terrible and cost too much. For days I was tired and hungry, my body was stiff from trying to ...
