Nerdette Book Club: Tania James on ‘Loot’
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
July’s Nerdette Book Club pick is the historical novel 'Loot' by Tania James!
The story opens in Mysore, India when a young wood carver named Abbas is summoned to the Sultan’s palace to help make a mechanical tiger. The novel spans continents and decades, but that tiger is at the center of the story. It’s based on the real artifact ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that depicts a tiger mauling a British soldier.
In this spoiler-free interview with the author, we talk about writing a delightful, propulsive plot that also deals with the legacy of colonialism.
Throw a copy of 'Loot' in your beach bag and read along with us! We’ll be back the last Tuesday of the month for a spoiler-filled discussion of the book. You can take part in the conversation by sending a voice memo with your thoughts on the book to nerdettepodcast@gmail.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still |
| 0:06.1 | watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you, |
| 0:12.7 | soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making, |
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| 0:25.7 | Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. |
| 0:28.3 | Listen, wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:38.9 | From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdette Book Club. |
| 0:42.3 | It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. |
| 0:45.8 | This month's book is Tanya James' historical novel Lute. The story opens in Mysore, India, in the late 1700s, where a young woodcarver named |
| 0:51.6 | a boss is summoned to the Sultan's palace to help make a mechanical tiger. |
| 0:56.9 | The novel spans continents and decades, but that tiger is at the center of the story. |
| 1:01.7 | And here to tell us more about her book is Tanya James, the book's author. |
| 1:05.5 | Tanya, welcome. |
| 1:06.8 | Hi, Greta. |
| 1:07.5 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:08.7 | Oh, my gosh. |
| 1:09.2 | Thanks for coming on. |
| 1:09.9 | So I was actually kind of mind blown when I realized that this tiger is actually real. It's at the Victorian Albert Museum in London. Yeah. I had never heard of it until I came across it in a book, but it is a six-foot-long wooden tiger that's mauling the throat of an English soldier. And there's, you know, back in the day when it |
| 1:28.7 | worked, you could turn a hand crank and the tiger would grunt and the soldier would groan. |
| 1:33.3 | And there was an organ that would play sort of a, you know, soundtrack for this little scene. |
| 1:38.8 | So it's pretty spectacular. I mean, the symbolism of that alone is just like rife with opportunity. Yeah, one of the things that was interesting to me is that it means different things to different people. So to Tipu Sultan, who is this ruler who commissioned it, he hated the British East India Company. So to him, it probably was a symbol of that hatred and that desire to destroy them. And then eventually |
| 2:01.9 | it comes into the hands of the British. And for them, it was probably a symbol of Indian savagery. |
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