Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?

If you thought this was a book about romance scamming because it has been widely publicized that it was, you will probably be disappointed. At least there is no in-depth examination of this act of exploiting the trust and neediness of others. The main character actually writes with basically just one love scammer, which develops into a private chat between the two. The author uses this chat-like communication to address topics such as the responsibility of the Western world towards the Third World, but also as a narrative device to reveal certain thoughts and predicaments of her (autobiographical) main character Juno, namely depression, financial precarity etc. She usually uses chatting with strangers as a vehicle for her own fantasizing. But with this one scammer called Benu, she goes on a personal level and builds a relationship of mutual interest and humanity. At least to a certain extent. Because even though she is interested in the life of the Nigerian Benu, after a few chapters you can't help but get the impression that she uses chatting with him more as a way to pour out her musings and emotional worlds and to have a reason to write down her thoughts and worries. As a result, the chat logs with Benu gradually become quite a self-portrayal of Juno/Hefter, with ultimately very little interest in Benu's life. Although the main character sympathizes with Benu's life and often thinks about him, she hardly asks him any real questions. Perhaps this is precisely what Hefter wants to make the story about: the impossibility of overcoming this geographical and life-world distance. However, she doesn't address these issues enough and instead focuses on herself so much that it becomes obnoxious sometimes, which is mostly due to the fact though, that I find the character Juno not very likeable.

Juno is a woman in her mid-50s with a husband who suffers from multiple sclerosis, who is also a writer and who she has to look after and whose care consists of many microtasks that Juno has to take on every day. At the same time, she is a dance theater performer who bounces from funding program to funding program and is always short of money. I find Hefter's female speaker position actually quite exciting. Because even though I follow a lot of female authors, the reality of life for women in their mid-50s is very unfamiliar to me and, in a way, this cohort is also somewhat invisible in society. Hefter describes, for example, how it would feel for her to go to a club or what it was like for her to get a tattoo at her age, what it's like to get date requests on Instagram, etc. Even though Hefter often stays too much on the surface here, Juno offers a compelling glimpse into her own life and challenges that I would actually like to learn about.

However, the way in which Hefter draws this portrait of himself - conveyed by Juno - is not very convincing and, in my opinion, not successful from a literary point of view either. Almost all the characters in the book are named after Roman and Greek deities, which already comes off as a cheap trick often having been tried to give the characters more depth by adding the possibility of associating the characters with the attributes that come with these ancient gods - a depth and a dimension of personality that the characters in this book often don't have. It's only Juno who Hefter gives any literary substance to. All the other characters in the book remain very shadowy and the gods' names don't help her.

It's also all well and good to choose certain leitmotifs for a novel. However, this often makes the novel feel very redundant, for example when the author explains to us several times that the theater stage is the only real life for her, the place where she feels alive and can be everything she can't be in everyday life. In fact, this introspection is already hackneyed the first time and doesn't get any better with repetition. I also don't find it very appealed that Lars von Trier's ‘Melancholia’, of all films, has to be used again and again to illuminate the inner life of Juno. Of course, the idea of a comet hitting Earth and the end of the world exerts a tremendous fascination on us. But it is also a very unsubtle and soon hackneyed symbol for the kind of depression or melancholy that is attributed to Juno here - and the frequency with which the movie is mentioned in almost every chapter, as well as the fact that Juno also recommends Benu to definitely watch that movie, seems like a parody almost.

What other authors succeed in doing convincingly, namely, starting from the description of everyday episodes to work out general, sometimes universal human feelings, worries, views of the world and ways of living together, Hefter fails magnificently and has a tendency to artificially charge things with meaning and existential content. Sometimes Hefter succeeds in that, but too often she does not. Although Juno's multiple burdens (sick husband, little income, being a woman, etc.) are also a recurring topos in the book and these are also things worth writing a book about, Hefter's writing often remains in the realm of the trivial and we watch the main character preparing reports for a cultural promotion program ready for the post office and knocking over her coffee in the process, and the coffee stain on the documents is then supposed to be symbolic of the multiple stress factors Juno is facing.

For long stretches, the book feels as if you are watching Hefter as she discovers and tries out the possibility of charging things with meaning in a poetic way - which doesn't always have to fail: for example, when she describes her somnambulism at the beginning of the book and how being awake for a long time fills her with euphoria. Elsewhere, however, her flowery descriptions remain trivial and uninteresting. If it hasn't worked for me to build up a fascination for Hefter's autobiographical main character over two thirds of the book, then I'm no longer interested in the fact that she is now allowed to babysit a friend's dog and enjoys being a dog mom. Her experiences of resonance in everyday life - for example when, after visiting her sick husband in hospital, she finds herself in front of the Krakenhaus under a starry sky and in the wind of a rescue helicopter and somehow finds this moment beautiful. So perhaps this particular moment was very significant or symbolic or intense for Juno and with a bit of good will, I can try to put myself in the character's shoes and empathize with it. But rarely does Hefter make us an offer as a symbol of what these moments are actually supposed to stand for. Certainly, much can be related to the major themes of the book: Depression, multiple stresses and precarity, aging, etc., but Hefter's actual exploration of these themes remains fairly thin and it is largely up to the reader to take this reflective work further.

Furthermore, the literary trick of breaking out of the narrator's perspective in the middle of the book and pointing out to the reader that Juno is actually Hefter herself (which is actually pretty clear from the start and no surprise at all) and that she only uses the romance scammer Benu as a reason to write, i.e. to have a reason to write and at the same time an addressee for her writing. It all feels very writing workshop-like in the book and more like a writing exercise than writing a novel. Which is fine, but all in all it makes the book seem rather half-baked. Of course, a book doesn't always have to be perfectly formed and self-contained, but »Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?« seems too erratic. The two scenic theater inserts in the book, which briefly break up the textual form of the book, come abruptly and seem more like stubborn impulses than enriching extensions of perspective to the rest of the text.

I am often unsure myself whether Hefter herself considers her descriptions important and what I should make of passages like these: »Der Komplex mit den Neubauten, die Karlbrücke über die Weiße Elster, hier konnte man die Sterne ganz gut sehen. Heute jedoch nicht, es war bedeckt. Ein Fuchs überquerte die Straße, dann zwei Waschbären, das war's.« I can appreciate the everydayness that Hefter writes about as well as the attempt to draw a picture of contemporary interpersonal communication, by including emojis and chat logs in her book. I can find some of the humorous parts in the book actually quite funny. I can find all this quite good so far. But in the end I find this whole story Hefter lays down here extremely simplified, somewhat shallow and largely uninteresting really.