East of Common Sense

What do you do when you don't get into university and the offer from the job centre literally takes your breath away? You pop along to a radio station audition with a friend and, after a series of bizarre events, you start working in the media without ever having even considered it. No dream come true, just a series of coincidences and making a virtue out of necessity. That, in short, was the beginning of Peter Bárdy's journalistic story, which, instead of a classic prologue, opens the imaginary doors to the audiobook with the apt title 'East of Common Sense'. Through a collection of 22 essays, you will enter the land of Dubček's rolls, holiday vouchers and bryndza cheese, Tiso's villa with the archives of the communist secret service, or pre-election, Hungarian and other goulash feasts. The author constructs an image of Slovakia and also one of himself. Sad and funny. Serious and witty. Kind and (self-)ironic. Personal and quite impersonal. He does not build a myth about the nation whose DNA he carries deep within him, nor about his country, which he does not want to leave, although he considered it for a while. He layers stories about bridges from which ammunition from the Second World War was thrown in childhood and which, in adulthood, turn into pseudo-bridges between East and West that divide. However, he does not remain on either bank: he is neither for nor against, he is not with 'our' people or 'your' people. He tries to build a bridge that everyone can walk on, and to find a language through authentic and, in a way, universal stories that transcend personal experience. Not a common language, just language itself. After all, who hasn't at least spat from a bridge onto the road below or, lost in thought, crossed on a red light? Peter Bárdy is not just the Peter Bárdy you know. The author of political bestsellers about Zuzana Čaputová, Robert Fico, and Igor Matovič. The editor-in-chief of Aktuality.sk and a political commentator. He is also a boy from a working-class family who, although he became a journalist by chance, has been one for almost three decades. And thanks to that, he experienced first-hand the power games of the 'founding fathers', led by the once-unassailable Mufti, as well as the moment when the greatest nationalist, Ján Slota, discovered the internet. When the social democrat Robert Fico brought Mečiar and Slota back into the game. When Igor Matovič failed to defeat the mafia state and opened the gate of the Government Office and the doors of the National Council to 'our people'.