It's Never Over
by Morley Callaghan
introduction by Norman Snider
1930 was an electrifying time for writing. Callaghan’s second novel, completed while he was living in Paris – imbibing and boxing with Joyce and Hemingway – has violence at its core. The story opens with the hanging of an ex-World War One soldier for involuntary murder. But first and foremost it is a story of love, a love haunted by that hanging. “It’s never over,” the dead man’s sister says, as she seeks to possess the life of her brother’s closest friend, John Hughes, who – “because a hanging draws everybody into it” – contemplates murder himself. The murder of the sister. As Norman Snider says, the novel is Dostoyevskian in it’s “depiction of the morbid progress of possession moving like a virus. This is sustained insight of a very high order.”
close this panelMorley Callaghan was the author of The Loved and the Lost, More Joy in Heaven, Now That April’s Here and Other Stories, Such is My Beloved, That Summer in Paris, and They Shall Inherit the Earth. He was a recipient of the Governor-General’s Award, the Lorne Pierce Medal, and the Order of Canada. Norman Snider is the screenwriter of Casino Jack, which premiered at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival and stars Kevin Spacey. His other films include Body Parts, Call Me: The Story of Heidi Fleiss, and David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He is the author of The Roaring Eighties and Other Good Times and the coauthor of Smokescreen. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
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