Own death

“I looked into its filmy eyes inquisitively and saw it was the body’s fear, not mine, not the soul’s, and so it was fear of death. I realised I could distinguish between my inner self and my physical body. An ice-cold surface covered my inner heat.” Péter Nádas In this short story a man relates his innermost thoughts as he suffers a heart attack on the street and is then brought back to life after three and a half minutes. It is a compelling tale of something appalling and completely ordinary, of pain and fear and acceptance, while walking the thin line between life and death. In contrast to the speed of this near-death experience, Own Death includes a series of photos in which the passage of time is hardly apparent. Over the course of a year the author photographed a wild pear tree in his garden at different times of the day, recording its changes under a range of light conditions. Own Death contrasts perceptions of the here and now with the hereafter, and its complex composition alludes to the passage of mortal time. Péter Nádas, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1942, worked as a press photographer before becoming a writer. His first book of stories was published in 1967 and his bestselling novel, A Book of Memories, was published in 1986. Nádas is among the most important authors of our time and has received numerous prizes including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, and the Kossuth Prize. Steidl published Nádas’ Etwas Licht in 1991.