I was delighted when this heartwarming story of a \u201cvaguely dalmatian-like crossbreed dog\u201d reached the top of my reading pile. What\u2019s not to love in a tale recounted by a rescue dog that journeys from a Singapore dog shelter to live with \u201cher\u201d \u2013 his writer-rescuer in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia?<\/p>\n
Or is it an odyssey from \u201ctropical jungle to concrete jungle\u201d, as Sun Jung, author of\u00a0My Name is Gucci: A Dog\u2019s Story,\u00a0<\/em>puts it.<\/p>\n Fellow dog-lovers will relish reading about all-too-familiar trips to Bunnings and Baskin & Robbins, but also the anti-dog war that breaks out in their apartment building, including Gucci\u2019s owner receiving a letter threatening the possibility of euthanasia.<\/p>\n Dog ownership spiked in the Covid-19 years and there are scenarios here to which many of us relate. The narrative draws us into the complexities of the relationship between dogs and their owners but also the comedy and genius of an anxious rescue dog that must ultimately confront and outsmart the human species.<\/p>\n This novel has much to offer to lovers of literature as well as lovers of dogs, but if you enjoyed the sections of chatty inner-monologue with the talking dog Six-Thirty in Bonnie Garmus\u2019\u00a0Lessons in Chemistry<\/em>\u00a0(Doubleday 2022), it may have especial appeal.<\/p>\n Like Sun Jung\u2019s previous time-travelling thriller\u00a0Bukit Brown<\/em>\u00a0(Penguin 2020), named for the well-known Singaporean cemetery and World War II battleground,\u00a0My Name is Gucci<\/em>\u00a0is also a story rich with cross-cultural appeal.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s South Korean references will appeal to lovers of stories such as\u00a0Welcome to the Hyunum-Dong Bookshop<\/em>\u00a0by Hwang Bo-Reum (Bloomsbury 2023) and the popular movie\u00a0Past Lives,<\/em>\u00a0directed by Celine Song in 2023.<\/p>\n The novel features a glossary of Korean words at the outset, which is a fascinating read in itself. The most significant word is Inyeon, which means Karmic relation or destiny \u2013 souls that are connected in previous lives are predestined to reconnect over endless reincarnations. As well as culturally interesting, this is a wonderful plot device because the previous connection between Gucci and his owner mean they know generations of each other\u2019s secrets, so I was also reminded of the films\u00a0A Dog\u2019s Purpose<\/em>\u00a0(2016) and\u00a0A Dog\u2019s Journey<\/em>\u00a0(2019).<\/p>\n Sun Jung\u2019s career background as a writer for media production companies and cultural magazines and developing film scripts for movie producers flows across into her writing with its sharp visualisation of scenes, whether it\u2019s feeding a retired sociology professor\u2019s hundreds of potted plants with seaweed concentrate, maintaining her worm farms and stopping her mackerel-coloured cat from digging up soil, or encounters in the apartment lift with hostile neighbours such as Georgina, the famous \u201cmongmong hater\u201d (mongmong means \u201cwoof-woof\u201d in Korean).<\/p>\n The novel is populated with intriguing canine characters from different time periods as well as being steeped in facts about dogs including that there is a DNA hunger mutation gene in labradors and that dog olfactory sense is 50,000 more acute than in humans.<\/p>\n Sun Jung\u2019s writing is rich with philosophical ideas, too, and I particularly liked her exploration of Kings Cross as a place that smells of \u201cstrangeness\u201d as well as \u201cdecadence, uproariousness and unconformity\u201d, twinned with Itaewon, an inner-city suburb of Seoul that shares a similar essence and history of harbouring misfits.<\/p>\n There are slivers of wisdom interlaced with lovely passages of description: \u201cJacaranda trees are beautiful when viewed from a distance. But down on the street, the mangled purple flowers that fell to the ground seemed rather wretched and pitiable \u2026 Pedestrians trampled the fallen flowers with outright indifference. It resembled our very existence, where we can see things that are not particularly beautiful if we look closely at other beings\u2019 lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all know it\u2019s a dog\u2019s life, which Gucci is living as the star of this quirky and thought-provoking canine tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,57],"tags":[27,19],"class_list":["post-1142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-ultimate-reading-lists","tag-book-club","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1142\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}