This is a bizarre, intriguing novel set in South Korea. Unpredictable, absurd, funny and horrifying, The Cabinet is definitely not for everyone but is worth a try if you want something unusual.

Narrated by Mr Kong, the story centres around a cabinet he finds in his workplace. The cabinet contains records of 'symptomers', people with very strange attributes, such as a man who nurtures a ginkgo tree growing from his finger, people who constantly erase and manipulate their own memories, a woman who involuntarily skips time, a girl with a lizard instead of a tongue and a man who is desperate to turn into a cat. Mr Kong becomes the custodian of the records and finds himself becoming a sort of counsellor. In between the stories of these people, he tells us about his life. You can see this novel as a collection of linked weird stories or you can look further into it, as philosophy and an exploration of capitalism and office culture in South Korea today. The ending is not for the fain-hearted.

Although I didn't love this book, I appreciated the oddness and I think it may be the first I've read by a South Korean author. I'd be interested to read more of his work.

Thank you to the publisher Angry Robot for the advance copy via NetGalley. The book was first published in 2006 as Kaebinit (캐비닛) - the English translation by Sean Lin Halbert will be published on 12th October.

[Note - this review will appear on my blog, 3rd October 2021]

I love the idea of this book, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution. I guess it all comes down to the fact that I was bored more often than not. It wasn’t weird enough, which is odd to say about a book like this. The stories are about symptomers, people "showing the symptoms of an evolving species", like the guy who had a gingko tree growing from his finger and people who eat inorganic substances like glass. But it felt like I was reading a Ripley’s Believe It or Not book, or the Guinness Book of World Records. My favorite story was actually the very first one about Ludger Sylbaris, which I really enjoyed. The book took a different turn though after that one. To be honest, after the 6th story (“Torporer”) I started to read the first page or so of a story, and if it sounded the same as the others but with a few things changed (like only the strange trait of the symptomer was different), I skipped it and moved on to the next. So there are some stories I never actually finished. I also found the stories about our narrator's life to be the toughest to get through.

Overall, the book just wasn't strange enough for me, and it seemed to meander, therefore I felt bored.

I will read more from this author (I actually bought Un-su Kim’s The Plotters already, which looks very different from this) even though this one wasn’t as big of a hit for me. I had such high expectations for this that I might’ve set it up for failure by that alone. The cover is my kind of style, so I was drawn to it for that reason first, then I read that it had new weird vibes, which is something I’m always looking for. And I somewhat recently read another Korean translation I got on Netgalley that is now among my favorite books of all time. I think I just hyped up The Cabinet too much because of those reasons and it couldn’t possibly live up to that.

"The Cabinet" and is basically a collection of stories that are grouped together in a closed filing cabinet. In the background is a frame story about a bored office worker, who breaks into the locked closet and reads the stories while at work to pass the time. It is reminiscent of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, via Borges, with touches of something else that I still have a hard time putting my finger on. The central theme is that humanity is evolving in new directions, and the stories present different symptoms, people sleeping for extremely long periods of time, people editing their memories, or merging with trees. This is a social commentary on the modern existence and office culture, reflecting workers who have to kowtow to an obnoxious boss who makes disparaging remarks against a female worker because of her looks.

The stories of these Sympotomers, or Chimeras, seem at first like fanciful anecdotes. However, as the reader advances in the story it appears that they might be creations or experiments done by the Professor. Things head towards a rather tumultuous ending when a crime syndicate takes an interest in those files and tries to buy them from the narrator.

An original imaginative read that begs for a slow reading, which builds into a rather complex tapestry which leaves the reader with food for thought.

Thank you Netgalley and Angry Robot for the digital ARC. #TheCabinet #NetGalley

Not the most memorable read, but quite well-written. I just didn't really click with the vignettes, as I wasn't expecting the book to be in the format of short stories.

3.5/5

The Cabinet is a highly imaginative, entertaining read. I love the tone of the first several chapters, as it's full of offbeat humor and some unsettling concepts. It slows down a little after that, and it doesn't culminate into really anything fantastic. I just wasn't really hooked by the concept of these files being sought after by some mysterious organization. It's not a bad route, just not the most memorable. The book as a whole, though, is quite good. And the translation is well done.

Wow, this was a crazy ride! We follow Mr. Kong, who's unhappy with his job because there's nothing to do, until one day he starts sneaking around and stumbling upon Cabinet 13. Cabinet 13 holds various files on "symptomers"—people with strange abilities and/or curious things happening to them, e.g. like a tree sprouting out of their finger. The story switches between cabinet files, stories about the symptomers meeting Mr. Kong, and Mr. Kong's daily life. While the symptomers' stories were pretty hit-or-miss—either you liked them or you didn't—I found the story around Mr. Kong and how he go into the whole thing utterly compelling and curiosity kept me reading on. BUT somehow, the book felt a bit too long with its 400 pages, and could've benefited from ~50 pages less. Other than this, I enjoyed "The Cabinet", as it was so different from Kim's previous released novel, "The Plotters" (except for the last parts).

I requested this one because it might be a 2021 title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book is not my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one rather than push myself to finish it only to give it a poor review.

The Cabinet is a fascinating read, as layered with curiosities as cabinet 13 itself. It shares a similar philosophical intent and double play in its approach to language, metaphor and narrative leap to a writer such as Italio Calvino and underwritten with deep humanity. Playful, heartfelt and truly thought-provoking. Loved it.

When I went into this book I had no idea what to expect but woah was it a surprise.. The plot is hard to explain but essentially, we follow Mr. Kong who mans the so called “Cabinet 13”, a cabinet filled with files about symptomers (people with abilities “normal” people don’t possess), as he tells us the life stories of these people and others who don’t necessarily have abilities but just chose to live life in other ways than the norm. As Mr. Kong tells us the reader these stories we follow his life story and the life experiences he has had in his life. With every chapter being told in almost short stories form with not that much plot that binds the chapters together I can see how this book might not be for everyone, but I loved it. Granted, not every chapter is as strong as the next, which is why it is not getting a 5-star rating, nonetheless it is a very engaging story that makes you think about life and the life choices we make and I would recommend everyone to check it out.

cw: graphic depiction of torture

Thank you to Netgalley and Angry Robot for sending me an advanced copy.

I struggled with this book a lot; its irreverent in a style tamer, but reminiscent of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that focuses its satire solely on the bureaucratic machinations of industry and government. The problem is I just did not find it funny or well-paced or particularly savage. What should have been at the start fun vignettes of Monster of the Weeks to ease you into this strange world were instead boring bestiary entries that thought mentioning perversion or poop once was a joke.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good perverted or poop joke. But there was no punch, no underlying theme, and no sense of progress in the first half of this book. I understand that the tedium was perhaps the point, but there is a thin line between satire that is boring and satire that is jabbing at tedium. This is very much solely the former.

Unfortunately, as the book ramps up as other reviewers will mention in its second half, the absolutely gut wrenching cloud of tedium that cost me two weeks of reading just wasn't going to go away.

I hope that this is a translation issue; that the unenviable job of translating humour was just too much. The style of the writing is a bit blunt. I hope if you pick this up you enjoy it, because it does have a much better second half, but I find it hard to recommend on its own merits.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books where I think I'm just not the audience for it. The novel consists of a series of almost comical vignettes of people with a variety of strange afflictions. Another reader might find this entertaining but I was just bored. It reminded me of the first season of the Magnus Archives so if you enjoyed that you might enjoy this book.

The only thing that kept me from putting down this book is my curiosity.
Following a bored office worker named Mr.Kong, his boredom led to him to Cabinet 13, where he flips through the various files on ‘symptomers.’ Out of all the stories, my favorite has to be the one about the man with the ginkgo tree growing from his finger. It’s an odd one that stood out to me, because of the man’s attitude towards the tiny shrub.
I will admit that this story is not one that can be chugged in one go, but devoured in chunks over a period of time. The characters’ complains about the stress of work, the boredom they face, the misery they feel due to the fast paced nature of modern office life are quite relatable. All of these contribute to the symptomers developing their strange symptoms.
This book is a mirror, and one you must look at carefully.

This book was incredibly confusing to me. The narrative order of the story was very unclear, which gave me a lot of trouble with following along and remembering all the characters. The book seemed to be trying to do three different things at once, and I don't think any of them really paid off. By the end of the book, I felt like the genre was completely different than the beginning, the story started getting interesting in a different way, and then the book ended. Unfortunately, I was just left confused and unfulfilled by this book.

Un-su Kim’s novel The Cabinet weaves the real and the unreal together in ways that both reflect and challenge certain assumptions of modern life. Its narrative engages both playfully and touchingly with the humanization of the unusual and the outlandish, the dehumanization suffered by people in capitalist work culture, and the complexity of being human at all in an ever-changing world.

At its finest, The Cabinet’s intricate structure and tragicomic commentary on 21st-century South Korean office culture manage the neat trick of portraying something universal through their very specificity. The boredom and alienation of people who do not feel that what they do has value is artfully juxtaposed with the desperation of people who want to be anything other than what they are, resulting in a narrative rich with empathy for many types of existential struggles.

Overall, this is a fascinating and rewarding read. I would recommend it for anyone who has ever felt alienated by work, relationships, or society at large, and for people who enjoy their absurdist literature spiked with the occasional genuine shock.

I received a free e-ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this quirky novel which tells the stories of “symptomers” — people who have odd habits or characteristics. Each story ends with a bit of a moral at the end.

The Cabinet was an absolutely fascinating read that captivated me from the very first page. At first it seems to be simply a collection of vignettes -- stories found in Cabinet 13. However, as we reach the second half of the book, one of those tales takes us into a stronger narrative thread, which then plays out until the story's end. The main theme of The Cabinet is a reflection on modern life and the speed of change that takes place these days. The 'symptomers' are people whose bodies have been so affected by this that they develop odd conditions, such as sleeping for months as a time or growing small trees on the tips of their fingers. The metaphors and social commentary are subtly handled, weaving effortlessly amid the stories, making it a book that is both fantastical and thought-provoking at the same time. I would definitely read more from this author in the future. This book gets 5 stars from me.

I found this sci-fi tale of queer abilities and what makes us different and unique to hit me right in the feelings. I laughed, cried, and fell in love with this world of weird abilities and understanding the differences that make us special. Thank you for the e-arc,

Prepare to meet people who drink gasoline, eat steel and chew newspapers, and a man who has a ginkgo tree growing on one of his fingers. They are known as “symptomers”; people who display the symptoms of a new evolution of the human species. Their records are stored in Cabinet 13, looked after by a Mr. Kong and his boss, Professor Kwon. The story introduces us to some of the colourful characters who are documented within the Cabinet and their singular situations. “Torporers” sleep for abnormally long periods, “memory mosaicers” can edit or delete unpleasant memories and “time skippers” lose long periods of their lives in an instant.
And then there are the troublesome, complaining daily phone calls from the symptomers. A persistent non-symptomer, Mr. Hwang, who wants to be turned into a cat to be with the woman he loves, calls everyday. Mr. Kong deals with these bizarre people everyday in a secret area of the lab where he works at a virtually non-existent job. Office politics and interpersonal relationships also play a major part in his daily working life. Eventually, Mr. Kong and the future of the Cabinet and the symptomers are threatened by sinister forces.
There is much to enjoy in the dry humour and bureaucratic silliness of this book but it has a serious side too, with an especially shocking yet darkly funny ending. Korean author Un-su Kim has crafted an absurdly wonderful world of unique individuals and characters. These people are usually greatly troubled, even tortured by their abilities. Beautifully written and translated, funny, tender and sometimes tragic, “The Cabinet” is an offbeat dose of Korean quirkiness and is one of the best books I’ve read all year.

"Cold noodles in a bowl for beef broth are not cold noodles. It’s just really poorly made beef broth.

곰탕 뚝배기에 냉면을 담아오면 그것은 냉면이 아니다. 그것은 잘못 만들어진 곰탕일 뿐이다"

The Cabinet is a transation by Sean Lin Halbert of 캐비닛 (the Hangeul phonetic rendition of 'cabinet') by 김언수 (Un-su Kim).

I have previously read 김언수's fascinating thriller The Plotters in Sora Kim-Russell's translation - my review.

This is I believe the debut translation by Sean Lin Halbert, who in 2018 was a Fiction Commendation Award winner in the Korea Times' 49th translation awards.

Cabinet begins with a wonderful disclaimer: All the information contained in the novel has been manufactured, modified, or distorted in some way, and should not be used as evidence in any argument, be it in a respected academic journal or a heated bar fight.

The relevance of this immediately becomes apparent in the opening story about Ludger Sylbaris who, in real-life, was one of the few survivors of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée which otherwise killed almost all the population of St Pierre in Martinique, Sylbaris surviving as he'd been incarcerated overnight inan underground cell. But in Kim's retelling, Sylbaris's prison was a tower not a dungeon and he "was locked away in the prison tower for twenty-four long years. He was put in prison at the age of sixteen, and it wasn’t until he turned forty that he was able to leave its confines. In fact, he was only able to escape with the help of the volcano, and not because he had served out his sentence."

The main strand of the novel consists of a number of similar, but entirely fictitious vignettes, drawn from the files of Cabinet 13, an otherwise unassuming filing cabinet in a municipal records office.

It is called Cabinet 13. But there is no particular reason for the number 13. It only means it’s the thirteenth cabinet from the left. This would probably be a better introduction if it had a fancier name. But then again, what would you expect from a cabinet?

A professor at the office has been researching for over 40 years people he dubs as "symptomers", people who have evolved in mysterious ways past our human norms. And our narrator, Kong Deok-geun, stumbles across the archive and ends up working as a filing assistant for Professor Kwon, who explains to him:

"Modern evolutionists like Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould have argued that species can evolve suddenly after million years of evolutionary dormancy– a theory they called “punctuated equilibrium.”
...
People are showing the symptoms of an evolving species. Without a suitable term from academia, we have decided to call these individuals “people with symptoms” or just “symptomers.” Symptomers break slightly from Homo sapiens as defined by biologists and anthropologists. They exist between the humans of today and the humans of the future– that is, they exist on the branch between species. They are both the last humans and the first of a new kind."

The trigger for such evolution being our hyper-intensive fast-changing capitalist modern world, an example being a group of people who have taken to bear-like hibernation, falling asleep for months on end:

"Modern people cannot fall into a deep sleep. Ever since the invention of electricity and the emergence of monolithic cities, the modern night has fallen into a state of constant unrest. In my opinion, the most lasting legacy of capitalism will be angst. Insurance, stocks, real estate, investments… The entire modern economy is based on anxiety, and as everyone knows, anxiety is the mortal enemy of a good night’s sleep. And insomnia only leads to more anxiety– it’s a vicious cycle. Thus, we are always anxious, internally and externally. Conversely, primitive humans were much more spiritual beings. They worked when the sun was out, and they dreamed and rested once it set. In other words, in order to live properly, you have to follow divine providence and live half your life working, and the other half dreaming."

Another series of stories concerns those whose diet consists of one, seemingly inedible or nutritionless, items - "In Singapore there is a man who lives off newspapers. By now this one should seem quite normal. Compared to ingesting gasoline, glass, and steel, eating newspapers seems almost cute.
...
What should we think of phenomena like these? How can people forgo perfectly fine foods like jjajangmyeon, spaghetti, and stir-fried octopus for gasoline, glass, newspapers, and sawdust? Usually, humans (actually not just humans, all animals) can recognize immediately what they can and can’t eat. It’s what we call the Garcia Effect."

Another is people for whom the border between reality and fiction has dissolved. These people meet their fears, or perhaps the illusion of their fears, in the physical world, including a class who really are eaten by the monsters under their bed.

One particularly poignant story concerns a man with a ginko tree growing from his finger, which he concerns Kong as the tree is taking is literally sucking the life out of the man, although the subject himself is naively delighted:

“Isn’t it splendid! This month it also grew an amazing amount. I guess the manure I applied to it was effective– smelly but effective.
[...]
I have so many questions. How much light should my ginkgo tree be getting? And I heard ginkgo trees are dioecious; do I need to cross-fertilize my ginkgo tree then? If I wave my arm in the air, will it cross-fertilize itself? Or do I need bees or butterflies? Oh, but I hate bees. What then? But it should fine. I can stand butterflies.”

“정말 굉장해요. 이번 달에도 엄청나게 자랐어요. 똥을 썩힌 거름을 바른 게 효과가 있나봐요. 냄새가 좀 나긴 하지만요, 하하.
[...]
물어보고 싶은 게 많아요. 햇빛은 어느 정도 받아야 하는 건지, 은행나무는 암수딴그루라고 하는데 그렇다면 교배는 어떻게 해야 하는 건지, 팔을 벌리고 있으면 알아서 교배를 해주는 건지, 아니라면 벌이나 나비가 해주는 건지. 저는 벌을 싫어하는데 어떻게 하죠? 하지만 괜찮아요. 나비는 좋아하니까요.”

And this story turns out to be the one that gives the novel, otherwise a fascinating collection of odd stories, a narrative spine, as a crime syndicate becomes interested in these hybrid human beings, convinced the Professor created rather than merely catalogued them. The resulting intrigue involves a relationship for Kong with a co-worker suffering from autism spectrum disorders and a torture scene that perhaps needs a trigger warning for the squeamish.

A clever cabinet of curiosities and conspiracies. 4+ stars and recommended.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.