A heart-woofing tale, designed and told by Gucci
We all know it’s a dog’s life, which Gucci is living as the star of this quirky and thought-provoking canine tale.
I was delighted when this heartwarming story of a “vaguely dalmatian-like crossbreed dog” reached the top of my reading pile. What’s not to love in a tale recounted by a rescue dog that journeys from a Singapore dog shelter to live with “her” – his writer-rescuer in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia?
Or is it an odyssey from “tropical jungle to concrete jungle”, as Sun Jung, author of My Name is Gucci: A Dog’s Story, puts it.
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’s owner receiving a letter threatening the possibility of euthanasia.
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.
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’ Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday 2022), it may have especial appeal.
Like Sun Jung’s previous time-travelling thriller Bukit Brown (Penguin 2020), named for the well-known Singaporean cemetery and World War II battleground, My Name is Gucci is also a story rich with cross-cultural appeal.
The book’s South Korean references will appeal to lovers of stories such as Welcome to the Hyunum-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum (Bloomsbury 2023) and the popular movie Past Lives, directed by Celine Song in 2023.
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 – 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’s secrets, so I was also reminded of the films A Dog’s Purpose (2016) and A Dog’s Journey (2019).
Sun Jung’s 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’s feeding a retired sociology professor’s 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 “mongmong hater” (mongmong means “woof-woof” in Korean).
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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.
Sun Jung’s writing is rich with philosophical ideas, too, and I particularly liked her exploration of Kings Cross as a place that smells of “strangeness” as well as “decadence, uproariousness and unconformity”, twinned with Itaewon, an inner-city suburb of Seoul that shares a similar essence and history of harbouring misfits.
There are slivers of wisdom interlaced with lovely passages of description: “Jacaranda 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 … 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’ lives.”
While this book is a “magical novel that will capture your heart”, as its marketing promises, it exceeds all expectations.
My Name is Gucci: A Dog’s Story by Sun Jung, Transit Lounge, $32.99. Dr Jane Frank is a Brisbane poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023.