Lit In The Library: Katy Masuga
Channel: SCCC Library
Date: 2016-05-27

Lit In The Library: Katy Masuga
Presented by The Seattle Central College English Department

ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF VERMILION by KATY MASUGA
 
The Origin of Vermilion (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), is composed of intertwining stories that move across four centuries: from Ceylon during the Thirty Years War to the precious metals collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of the present day; from Reformation Vienna to Mongolia's post-Cold War orphans. It springs from the author’s own story: born in prison, haunted by premonitory dreams and transformed by motherhood.   
 
Influenced by the elliptical styles of Sebald, Borges and Woolf, The Origin of Vermilion tells three stories through an interlinking narrative: the narrator's physical and spiritual journey to unexpectedly becoming a mother; a collection of alternating, mixed media vignettes on the childhood of the narrator's mother and her final abandonment of her ten children; the Faustian tale of the “man with the watch” of the 17th Century, who appears in the narrator’s visions.   
 
The Origin of Vermilion traces the story of the narrator as she pieces together her mother’s past while looking for clues on the origin and purpose of an ancient key and the significance of a timeless, Mephistophelean figure called Hein while weaving together historical events and figures including Black Elk, Diego Velázquez and Farid al-Din Attar, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Michel Foucault and a burlesque insect circus in London.   
 
At its core, The Origin of Vermilion is a reflection on the nature of writing, memory, truth, fiction and the concept of the collective existence of humanity.
 
www.spuytenduyvil.net/the-origin-of-vermilion.html
Katy Masuga, University of Paris-Sorbonne fellow (2015-2016), holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a joint Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Criticism from the University of Washington, Seattle, with a focus on comparative modernisms and image and text relations, moving broadly across genres, periods and languages. She is the author of The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011), Henry Miller and How He Got That Way (Edinburgh UP, 2011), as well as numerous essays, anthology chapters and fiction/non-fiction blurring short stories. The Origin of Vermilion is her first novel.