Martina Hefter's Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? has sparked considerable debate within German literary circles. After winning the country's most prestigious fiction award in 2024, it sold 80,000 copies rapidly. However, critics remain divided: Die Zeit likened the book's allure to the love scammers it portrays, while Deutschlandfunk Kultur criticised its shallow characterisation and monotonous dialogue.
A Promising Premise
The novel's premise is instantly captivating: Juno, a feisty middle-aged ballet dancer, trolls romance scammers but unexpectedly connects with a Nigerian man on the other end of the line. Juno's obsessions with ageing, mortality, and her physique have stifled her personality. As her dance career declines and she dedicates most of her time to caring for her ailing husband, Jupiter, she seeks meaning in her life. Yet she remains depressed, burdened by unexamined anger and guilt. Through her scathing perspective, she perceives decay and deceit everywhere. Unable to sleep, she baits love scammers into conversation, thinking: “Go ahead and write to women who are dumb enough to fall for that. The main thing is that I have a counterpart.”
Unclear Objectives
However, it remains ambiguous what Juno hopes to achieve with her lengthy, confusing responses to these men. She does not toy with them, ensnare them in her own web, or waste their time. There is no playfulness, as she claims to desire, nor any genuine conversation—only baffling rants about her own peculiar issues. The men eventually depart, leaving Juno feeling clever.
Meeting Benu
Eventually, she meets Benu from Nigeria, also known as Owen_Wilson223. This friendship, presented as the story's core, never approaches intimacy or interest because Juno shows little genuine curiosity beyond her ageing body and the film Melancholia, which Hefter burdens with excessive symbolic weight.
I wish Hefter had devoted more time to disentangling Juno from her source material. Perhaps because her characters have not yet fully blossomed in her imagination, revealing their layers, contradictions, and subtext, she articulates much that should remain unspoken. We are told, “It was possible that she was the real Juno in these chats,” and “Juno asked herself whether the tattoos served a purpose for her, whether they were a substitute for something else.”
Surface-Level Exploration
In her nocturnal chats with Benu, Juno touches on poetry, dancing, income inequality, food insecurity, and Nigeria, but never delves beyond a superficial examination of these subjects. Despite her extensive reading on Nigeria, she cannot perceive Benu as anything other than a conman. When he shares his future plans, her paranoia immediately surfaces: he must be executing a long con and will soon request capital.
This doomed dynamic, had it been allowed to develop and unfold, could have added nuance to Juno's character, who is clearly devoted to Jupiter and whose life is filled with intriguing power imbalances. Instead, Hefter lets this opportunity slip away, continually gesturing toward Juno's ageing body, Jupiter's impending death, and everyone's mortality. In the final four pages, Juno's internal transformation is spelled out—that life is about the rehearsals, not the stage; that she could have been Benu's friend; that the melancholia has dissipated. Yet it all feels overwritten and underfelt.
Lost in Translation?
Is there a subtext here that perhaps did not survive translation? Am I reading a sharp critique of an oblivious white woman whose distrust of everyone around her and loathing of her ageing self have blinded her to genuine friendship, simply because unequal financial circumstances might require her to pay some money? Ultimately, I do not believe that. Because despite all we know about Juno's life and surface thoughts, we never grasp her singular nature—or Benu's. And because I, a lover of despicable characters and a middle-aged woman sharing all of Juno's obsessions, was bored. Like Benu on the novel's final page, I have already forgotten her.
Dina Nayeri is the author of A Happy Death, forthcoming in 2027. Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? by Martina Hefter, translated by Linda Gaus, is published by Fig Tree (£14.99).
