Knižná galaxia: Peter Bárdy – Na východ od zdravého rozumu

What to do when you don’t get into university and the job office offer literally takes your breath away? You take a break with a friend to audition for a radio station, after which the program director tells you that you “will never be” a host.

When you cluelessly nod after the question of whether you can read, they will force you to read a fairy tale book in a corner covered with egg cartons. So that after a few days of quirky training, they conclude that you can read the morning news live. And you start working in the media without ever having thought about it. No fulfilled dream, just a coincidence and necessity virtue.

That was, in short, the beginning of the journalistic story of Peter Bárdy, who instead of a classic prologue opens an imaginary door to his latest book. His fifth authored title aptly named To the East of Common Sense.

The jubilee, twentieth book published under the auspices of Aktuality.sk is different from what you might expect. Not only in content but also in graphic design, paper, and printing.

And Peter Bárdy is personal this time. Through 22 essays - stories, he will take you to the land of Dubček's croissants and bryndza, Tiso's villa with archives of the communist secret police, or pre-election, Hungarian and other stews.

You will listen to foreign conversations, even though you were taught at home that you shouldn’t. Watch as Jano Slota discovers the internet or swims across the Danube instead of having breakfast with Captain Danko. You will be there when Robert Fico brings Mečiar and Slota back into the game, Igor Matovič does not defeat the mafia state, and the four-time prime minister starts a spiral of revenge.

Peter Bárdy in the book To the East of Common Sense is not just the Peter Bárdy you know. The author of political bestsellers about Zuzana Čaputová, Robert Fico, or Igor Matovič. The editor-in-chief of Aktuality.sk and a political commentator.

He is a guy from a working-class family who became a journalist by chance but has been one for nearly three decades. He is a secret fan of croissants with bryndza, who doesn’t take pictures with croissants, nor in the fields, fiddling with ears of corn, but spends long hours typing on a keyboard.

And he is also the writer of the year, whom the longest-serving Slovak prime minister sued over the cover of the book and is demanding one hundred thousand euros (the same amount he wants from the publisher). And he did not back down and wrote his fifth book, which has been maturing within him all these years, to provide his own report on Slovakia, Slovaks, and Slovak women. About himself, about us. Sincere, uncensored.

To the East of Common Sense is a collection of essays - stories from which Peter Bárdy composes a picture of Slovakia. Sad and funny. Serious and witty. Kind and (self)ironic. Personal and completely depersonalized.

The editor-in-chief of Aktuality.sk does not build a myth about a nation whose DNA he carries deep within himself, nor about his country, from which he does not want to leave, even though he considered it for a while. He layers stories about bridges, from which ammunition from World War II fell during childhood, and which change into pseudobridges between East and West in adulthood, dividing them.

However, he does not remain on either bank: he is neither against nor for, he is neither with “our” nor “your” people.

He tries to build a bridge over which everyone can walk and find a language through authentic and in a certain way universal stories that transcend the boundaries of personal experience. Not a common one, just a language. After all, who hasn't let at least a spit or passed in thought at a red light from a bridge?

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