Novel
Dolly City
דולי סיטי
Orly Castel-Bloom · 1992
Synopsis
Dolly, a doctor who studied in Kathmandu, lives on the thirty-seventh floor of a four-hundred-storey tower in Dolly City, a noisy, chaotic city. While burying her dog, she finds a wounded infant in a rubbish bag, tends him, keeps him and names him Ben. At once the fear that harm may come to him overwhelms her: she vaccinates him against everything, operates on him to make sure he is healthy, grafts onto him a kidney she believes he lacks, carves the map of the land of Israel on his back with a knife, and subjects him to chemotherapy for a cancer he does not have.
Context
The book appeared in 1992 from Zmora-Bitan, under the literary direction of Haïm Pessah, and a revised version appeared in 2007. It is composed of four parts, like a monologue by Dolly that follows the child from early childhood to adulthood. Staged in Tel Aviv, it has been translated into nine languages, including French in 1993 and English in 1997. The critic Gershon Shaked saw in its author a writer who had changed the face of Hebrew literature.
Who it is for
A short novel, about two hundred pages in French. It is better to know that everything is told by Dolly herself, with no outside voice.
Prizes and reception
Selected by UNESCO among the works representative of the literature of its country, and adapted for the theatre.
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