JEPSEN,
Vivienne
A boisterous,
braggadocious, ranting, randy, maverick mélange of
confessional fiction, roman
à clef, literary allusion and savage satire, it won praise
from reviewers who
confessed to shell-shock.
Author entry from The
Oxford Companion
to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger
Robinson and Nelson
Wattie (1998), pp. 268. Entry written by Roger Robinson [About
the Companion
entries]
JEPSEN, Vivienne (1950–
), won the 1992 Reed Fiction Award (for new writers) with The
House of Olaf
Krull (1994). This recounts the return of Olivia Krull in
early middle age
from a somnolent marriage in New York to visit family in New Zealand,
but as
reviewer Ronda Cooper commented, ‘what’s meant to
be a nostalgic reconciliation
turns into a kind of jihad’. Olivia rampages and ravishes her
way through
family, farm and then the even more peccant fields of Wellington and
its
university’s English department. A boisterous, braggadocious,
ranting, randy,
maverick mélange of confessional fiction, roman à
clef, literary allusion and
savage satire, it won praise from reviewers who confessed to
shell-shock. David
Eggleton
called it ‘rambling, manic and aggressive’ but
praised ‘its fine sense of
social hierarchies’ and ‘fearless deconstruction of
Wellington party-life’ and
Cooper recognised that though ‘driven by the need to
unload’ its ‘sheer
emotional weight has its own momentum’.
Jepsen was born in
Otaki, has lived in Rerewhakaaitu, Hamilton, Auckland, Christchurch,
London,
New York and Wellington and is enrolled as a doctoral student at
Victoria
University.
Updated information
Vivienne Jepsen's
thesis for her Doctorate of Philosophy, titled, Patriarchy
and Illegitimate
Subtext: A Gender Difference in NZ Writing, was conferred in
1999.