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Martina Hefter’s Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? has caused much controversy in German literary circles. It won the best fiction award in the country in 2024, and quickly sold 80,000 copies. But critics were divided: Die Zeit compared the book’s persuasive power to the con artists it portrays, while Deutschlandfunk Kultur criticized its shallow characters and dull dialogue.
I was immediately drawn to the fact that: a middle-aged dancer walking awkwardly, she keeps in touch with a Nigerian on the other end of the phone. Juno is a ballet dancer whose obsession with aging, death and her own body has distorted her personality. With less work and more time to care for her husband, Jupiter, she yearns for meaning. But he is depressed, full of unexplained anger and guilt. Everywhere, through his lens of horror, he sees corruption and deceit. Unable to sleep, he engages the tricksters in conversation. “Keep writing for women who are dumb enough to fall for it,” he thinks. “The main thing is that I have a friend.”
But it is not clear what he is trying to achieve with his long, confusing responses to these men. He doesn’t play with them, or distract them from his internet, or waste their time. No drama, as they claim to want. And there is no more discussion, it’s just obfuscating about his own problems. The men leave. Juno feels that she has been clever.
He later meets Benu from Nigeria, also known as Owen_Wilson223. This friendship, designed as the crux of the story, doesn’t come close or interesting because Juno doesn’t really love much more than her aging body and the film Melancholia, which Hefter allows to carry more symbolic weight than it should.
I wish Hefter had taken more time to free Juno from his source. Perhaps because his characters have not blossomed in his mind, and reveal their layers, contradictions, and small words to the author, they express much that should not be said. “It was possible she was the real Juno in this conversation,” we’re told. Or “Juno wondered if the notes helped her, if they replaced something else.”
In her nightly conversation with Benu, Juno touches on several topics: poetry, dance, income inequality, lack of food, Nigeria, but she does not continue to ask about these things. And, for all his Nigerian writings, he cannot see Benu as a hypocrite. When he shares what he wants for the future, his thoughts immediately take over: he must be doing it for a long time and soon he will need a lot of money.
If this had been allowed, if it had been allowed to grow and spread, it would have led to the transformation of Juno, who is devoted to Jupiter and whose life is full of happy energy imbalances. Instead, Hefter lets this opportunity slip away and focuses on Juno’s aging body, Jupiter’s impending death, all of our deaths. In the last four pages, Juno’s inner transformation is revealed – that life is a rehearsal, not a stage. That she can be Benu’s friend. That melancholia is gone, but everything sounds like it’s written and doesn’t make sense.
Are there any subtexts here that may not have made it through to translation? Am I reading the most critical words of a careless white woman whose mistrust of everyone around her, and her disgust with her age, have blinded her to true friendship, because unequal financial conditions may mean she has to pay some bills? In the end, I don’t believe that. Because, although we know everything about Juno’s life and her thoughts on the surface, we do not understand that she is the only one (or Benu). And because I, a lover of the underdog, and a middle-aged woman who shares Juno’s passions, I was bored. Like Benu on the last page of the book, I have already forgotten him.
