+ N Y Times 25:307 Je 13 ’20 800w + Outlook 125:507 Jl 14 ’20 40w
“It is, at all events, a gay little affair. It is a romantic comedy in the vein of ‘Twelfth night’—which, with its disconsolate young lord and the manner of his comforting, it vaguely resembles.”
+ Review 3:110 Ag 4 ’20 320w
“Told with light, ironic humor and exquisite artistry.”
+ Wis Lib Bul 16:237 D ’20 40w
COURNOS, JOHN. Mask. *$1.90 (2c) Doran
20–262
“This is the story of the making of a human mask.” (Overture) It is the story of John Gombarov’s childhood and youth, as he told it years afterward to a friend in London. Born in Russia, into a family of “emancipated Jews,” he spends his early childhood there and tells of the quaint customs and the kind of people he remembers. Then, the family fortune being hopelessly ruined by his stepfather, a man with the soul of a child and the mind of an inventor, they come to America, the land of promise. The process of Americanization that Vanya, now John, goes through in ‘The city of brotherly love’ is not a pretty picture to contemplate. There the “wretched little foreigner” is run “through a mangle” to “wring Europe out of his flesh and bones like dirt out of a garment.” Only a heroic soul of the type of John Gombarov’s could survive uncrushed. But it put the mask on his face.
Booklist 16:243 Ap ’20