Dolly City - (Hebrew Literature) by Orly Castel-Bloom (Paperback)

Number of Pages: 167
Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
Sub-Genre: Literary
Series Title: Hebrew Literature
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Age Range: Adult
Author: Orly Castel-Bloom
Language: English

About the Book

Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting--and brilliant--literary works ever to come out of Israel.

Book Synopsis

""Dolly City"--a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son, who she names "Son." Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood--and its implications in the work of a nation. Gruesome, irreverent, and hilarious, "Dolly City" is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting--and brilliant--works ever written in Hebrew.

Review Quotes

Castel-Bloom is one of Israel's most original and outrageous writers. She pushes her themes to the limits, often to the cutting edge of madness. Her masterpiece, the novel Dolly City, takes on the theme of motherhood with the blackest of humor . . . With energy and a sense of play, Castel-Bloom reveals the nihilism, violence and sadism seething within us all.

Dolly City is an irreverent and witty satire, an original and timely tour de force about the Yiddishe-mama complex. Drifting and alienated in a hostile city, Mother Dolly (Israel) doctors her adopted son with a love that destroys, until she learns the meaning of compassion.

From the first pages, Dolly City asserts itself as an important text . . . Kafka has finally arrived in Tel Aviv.