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          The print literature that I chose for my blog in relation to Calvino and Macnab is Dolly City written by Orly Castel-Bloom. Dolly City is an irreverent, witty satire, written to reflect the Yiddish-mama complex. Drifting and alienated in a hostile city, Mother Dolly (Israel) doctors her son with a love that ultimately destroys him mentally and physically. Throughout the novel, the mother Dolly learns the meaning of compassion. Since Dolly is afflicted with a disease that does not appear in the medical textbooks she becomes a chronic sufferer from attacks of infinite possibilities. The novel is propelled by the author’s wild imagination let loose, but what seems at first to be breathtaking madness turns out to contain pure logic. On one level, it is the story of the young physician, Dolly, whose home houses a laboratory for operating on animals. She adopts a hungry, blue baby boy whom she found in a bag by the side of the road. Worry and revulsion, rage and boundless love are all part of Dolly’s complex attitude toward the boy, a kind of postmodern variation on the Jewish mother. Afraid that the child will contract diseases, she transplants various organs into his body and gives him every possible inoculation.

          Mother-son relations are intriguingly illuminated in the second level of the text, also implying the complex bonds with the Land of Israel. Using a scalpel, Dolly carves a map of biblical Israel on her son’s back, just one of a series of images through which the author probes Israeli reality. Dolly City is an interesting novel to compare to the works we have read in class because it proves many of Calvino’s theories and shows the importance of each memo he discusses. This book became famous for Orly Castel-Bloom because of her writing style and how she portrays the crazed protagonist on so many different levels.

          After reading this book more than one time, I found new ways to interpret it and each time new ideas came up. Even after reading Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I found new ways to analyze the novel. Dolly City is such an intense book, and therefore hard to put down, which made it really interesting for me to use for this project. Overall, I want to explore the novel in more depth while using Calvino and Macnab’s ideas.