David Bloomberg

A bi-sexual matinee idol with substance abuse problems and a startlingly tedious life finds eventual happiness and sort-of sobriety. Oh, and he was sexually abused by a Catholic priest [who else?] as a child and met a few mildly famous people along the way.

Patrick Donovan is the creation of former Cape Town mayor David Bloomberg who has been a jack of all trades in a career straddling everything from law to the theatre: one thing he didn’t learn was to write entertaining and grammatical English along the way, as evidenced in The Don… The Story of an Actor, which is so badly edited I thought it was self-published.

The Don leaves his Catholic orphanage to follow his acting dream and before long is the toast of London, famous for his talent and infamous for his multitudinous and simultaneous affairs with both sexes. Bloomberg’s novel is unique in that it deals with these promising themes without an iota of wit and, despite the injection of some actual theatre personalities of the 50s and 60s, is drearily unconvincing.… (altro)