It’s been a pretty long time since I’ve written one of these now; both Eric and On the Road remain undocumented. But the book I finished most recently, Dolly City, has been almost entirely, insatiably stuck in my head since (and I can’t purge on the wiki page because it doesn’t exist yet, so that’s fucked/my next wiki project).

Dolly City was written by Orly Castel-Bloom in 1992 (unfortunately, the only one of her thirteen books available at even World’s Biggest. Human Parts is a novel that has also been translated into English, but the last two cities I checked didn’t have it). It was first written in Hebrew, Castel-Bloom’s second language. And it’s absolutely beautiful. The book follows the uncanny Dolly, a doctor who studied medicine at Katmandu and then recruited small animal subjects in “Dolly City”, Israel. When her pet the goldfish died, it too became a subject (and a meal) but she sent her late dog to be buried. When caught the man she paid to bury her dog cutting him up, more crudely than but not totally unlike she would have, she committed the first of many homicides in the book. She also finds a baby in the car of the man she killed and takes it in, naming him Son. 

Her original intention was to kill Son as soon as she got home, then later, until her desire became unrestrained enthusiasm for monitoring the baby’s well-being. She fed him anaesthetics and antidepressants and opened him up and drew a map of Israel on his back and updated it as he grew so it still looked right. Then she couldn’t stand to look at him, or have him touch her. The baby left her possession many times and the reader can only believe Castel-Bloom when she says Son learned to talk, learned facts and to be interested and became the bright young boy with whom Dolly is presented later during her absence. These events are interspersed with Dolly receiving psychiatric treatment (and fucking then castrating a psychologist whose diagnosis she didn’t like, on separate occasions), and this might contribute to why at the end of the book she concedes honest love for Son and concern for her well-being independent of her involvement. 

There’s a lot going on in the book, and it’s all so well written (and hard to know what to believe). It really seems fearless, as Castel-Bloom passes off political commentary like nothing and that makes it feel so much more important. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out - amazing use of black humour and just creepy enough that you can still fall in love with Dolly. Fact. I know I’ll read it through a couple more times - it’s 158 pages and I’m still not sure if I believe half of it.