A key sentence in Martina Hefter’s novel “Hey, good morning, how are you?” is: “As long as I play, nothing happens.” Its protagonist, named after the Roman goddess Juno, says that there is hardly anything more comforting than to keep up appearances and keep things in limbo with fantastic claims.
And because she also knows that everything heartbreaking has already happened, she is perhaps the honestest liar imaginable.
Nigerian love scammers
Juno, says the jury’s statement for the German Book Prize, “is in her mid-50s, leads a precarious life as a performance artist in Leipzig and cares for her husband, who suffers from MS. During sleepless nights, she chats with a Nigerian love scammer who is after her money. The question arises as to who is exploiting whom – and what happens when, contrary to expectations, the boundaries between digital play and real affection become blurred.”
That’s it: even virtual excuses have reality effects. And when she writes posts that deliberately overwhelm the love scammers on the other end, she doesn’t just turn the tables: she invents a counterworld; she tries out what fiction does to her life and those of others. And last but not least, that makes life a little easier with her husband Jupiter, who is lying next door in the nursing bed,
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For the poet, performance artist and dancer Martina Hefter, the book prize is the highlight of a year in which she was first awarded the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund, then the Literature Prize of the state capital Wiesbaden – both in recognition of her body of work, which has been his strengths in recent years especially in poetry. This novel, written in just one year and juggling autobiographical material, is a respectable “compromise decision” (jury spokeswoman Natascha Freundel) in a difficult environment, because the book price has to please many people. The book trade also wants to benefit from this
Ronya Othmann’s “Seventy-Four”, a disturbing novel consisting of autobiographical, documentary and reportage-like layers about the Iraqi IS genocide of the Yazidis in 2014, would have been seen above all as a decision for political relevance. Maren Kames’ “Hare Prose”, written in the spirit of Friederike Mayröcker, lives entirely from the erratic stubbornness of linguistic movements.
With his 1,000-page monster “The Projectors,” Clemens Meyer, on the other hand, chose Karl May as the patron saint of a period novel without measure or goal. Markus Thielemann’s wolf novel “Thunder Rolls From the North” from the Lüneburg Heath perhaps tries all too clearly to draw a line to the right-wing extremist dangers of these days. And there is something picturesque about Iris Wolff’s “Lichtungen” about a difficult-to-rekindle friendship from the Romanian Ceausescu era.
Jupiter’s Counter Book
Along with Hefter’s novel, you should definitely read the book written by her husband, whose real name is Jan Kuhlbrodt. What concerns them in a playful way, “Krüppelpassion” (Gans Verlag) transforms into scenes and reflections that stage the farewell to the usual life forced by multiple sclerosis in a rare mixture of sobriety and self-irony.
For example, he examines the connection between walking and thinking, which the ancient Peripatetics made an ideal. The battle for mental and physical agility that dancer Martina Hefter wages is perhaps just another way of dealing with this crippling challenge on both sides.