Tova Mirvis
Reading Visible City in class allowed me to soak in every word of Tova Mirvis’ discussion. As an author Mirvis speaks with elegance and grace. It is as though the words roll right off her tongue in a fashion that resembles poetry. I speak so highly of her because of the way she drew me in as a reader of her novel, and a spectator in her discussion.
After reading Visible City, I found myself looking upward quite often. We walk around the place we know and love and we’ve become numb to the beauty all around us. There is a beautiful city littered with magnificent works of art and history that we do not even realize we succumb to on a day to day basis.
In the city that never sleeps, I resonated with her when she spoke about privacy. In the suburbs it is hard to lose yourself in a world where everyone knows each other. You see the same people every day and you see the same things every day. As Nina said, “she didn’t want to live in a place where the streets were empty, the adults walled inside their homes, the kids fenced inside backyards.” There is a sense of the looking glass. Looking into everyone’s lives and peering into their worlds in which we do not normally get a chance to see. As Mirvis said, in the suburbs you need curtains to shield those around you from an invasion of privacy; however in the city we happily invade each other’s privacies because we are all strangers.
I find the beauty in resolute ideologies Mirvis refuses to let go of. Mirvis speaks of being a mother and having unequivocal desires, yet she struggles with trying to figure out whether or not she should allow her children into that part of her soul. That feeling of freedom is something Nina, Leon, Claudia, Emma and Jeremy all sought after in this book. Each character had a deep desire within that they refused to let go of, in fear of losing themselves in the process. This resounding freedom is what makes the characters so real and personable. Then when Mirvis speaks, it is with the same unapologetic sense of happiness to release a part of herself to the world through her writing, stories and art. Mirvis’ passion is what allows us to really believe in ourselves, our dreams and our passions.