Unusual short story book translated from Korean. A cabinet holds files about Symptomers who are people showing symptoms of an accelerated evolution or who break away slightly from Homo sapiens.

Our main character, a bored office worker, discovers the cabinet and reads the files.
Thanks to Netgalley and Angry Robot publishers for allowing me to read this book.

This was pretty interesting to me. Not the typical genre I read so I definitely am not the target audience; but I will say it is enjoyable and entertaining enough!

From the first page, The Cabinet is such a refreshing read. The author’s rich imagination makes this a fun book to explore: who knows what eccentricities, what symptomers, you will read about on the next page. Or whether or not the overarching story will lead to a climax. Think of a ginkgo tree growing from a man’s finger or people eating gasoline or glass. One man even ate a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge because it was too beautiful to resist. These are people for whom the line between reality and fiction has dissolved.

Absurdity that hits close to home
Many chapters feel a bit absurd, in a good way, but you get used to it and the fascination lessens. For example, the content of the book of Ludger in the story Why, Ludger Sylbaris, Why? is rather amusing. In this first chapter you don’t yet know enough about the world to interpret the words. He describes the eccentricities of the people in Saint-Pierre. With graphic detail. I wonder why.

The narrator is a cabinet manager who discusses people’s stories after reading the records of extraordinary people from the cabinet of curiosities. He staffs his post to get a paycheck. You can analyze his life and the lives of the symptomers he talks about. But is a Torporer who sleeps long to relax and escape life very eccentric? Many people feel like they don’t belong and the only one they can talk to is the cabinet manager.

One chapter that hits home is I’m Over Here, Too, a story about the order of evacuation of objects and people: when you are deemed less important than a strategic object, you may find a newfound interest in objects. If you were to read this chapter separately, it wouldn’t make a big impression on you. But together with the other chapters, it leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness, of not being valued for who you are.

Diversity and inclusion
There is an overarching story for the cabinet manager. People from one chapter are mentioned in other chapters, sometimes their stories continue later. When you read this book, it feels like you are exploring the unknown and unseen extraordinary elements in this world.

For me, this book is about diversity and inclusion. There is no system in place for the people who are different. Nor are they considered strange or pitied. The narrator’s ordinary life is contrasted with the lives of the “special” people who make more of their lives than he does. He just processes all the wonderful opportunities that exist in the world.

There are many different ways to live and it is difficult to understand them all. The more you think about it, the more realistic it becomes. This is us.

Conclusion
The Cabinet is an interesting book that may feel different on re-reading, when you know how it ends and why certain aspects are introduced to the story. But what is the real story? Fiction and reality will blend together differently for you than they do for me. This book made me think and go back to earlier chapters to find more meaning in them. It is not a plot-driven story, it is meaning-driven.

"The modern night has fallen into a state of constant unrests. In my opinion, the most lasting legacy of capitalism will be angst".

Trigger warning: violence, eating disorders.

The plot is only one part of the story. We follow Mr Kong', glorified office worker turned-cabinet 13's caretaker, as he takes on the responsibility for a sub-group of citizens who exhibit supernatural qualities. Initially lazy and untrustworthy, his character develops beyond expectation into one of humility and self-awareness as he chooses to protect the citizen's whose identities are protected by the relative security of the cabinet.

Korean literature is a guilty pleasure for it's rich undertones of criticism and questioning around modern society. Kim is highly sceptical of current institutions and sheds light on bleak but thought-provoking considerations. "Being human is like taking a number. You just need to wait your turn quietly. There's nothing else you can do". He reflects his ideas in his characters, from the bored and unfulfilled office workers to the sub-group who he subtly hints may be the by-product of human experimentation. This is never confirmed, further highlighting just how little we really know about our lives.

I loved the crude humour, I loved the humanness and the no-frills, dry wit. Each case study was more bizarre than the last and the entire story has no true end, yet plays on the readers mind with possible conclusions. Kim writes exceptionally well in a way that sucks the reader in and leads you along the footpath right until the very last step, allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Bravo.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

As a big fan of Haruki Murakami's work, I was delighted to discover Un-su Kim and Cabinet 13. It very much put me in mind also of Ian Mcewan and Kazuo Ishiguro's novels.

This book encapsulates the mundanity of modern life, with beautifully detailed characters, who are at times hilarious and tragic in equal measure, and an everyman protagonist who gets so totally out of his depth; as he gets more involved with Cabinet 13 and Professor Kwon's research.

An excellent read.

Something of an affectionately satirical curiosity, this book is episodic by nature so easy to enjoy a chapter here and there as a gentle diversion with a cup of tea. I never warmed to narrator Kong Deok-geun, the admin assistant (who often seemed he would be happier in another job), but the case files of the 'symptomers' held in Cabinet 13 were a delight. Often surreal, sometimes grotesque, the book is as much about the emotional and psychological response of the symptomers as about the odd conditions they are learning to live with. Throughout, Kim creates space for cynicism, often (if not always) leaving room for the reader to diagnose mental illness or delusions instead of weird evolution; but he invites the reader to believe.

"You may never discover magic. But it won’t be because magic doesn’t exist. It’ll be because you stopped dreaming."

At its best, The Cabinet urges us to allow the universe to be bigger than we know; to marvel at how resilient humanity can be; to be compassionate towards those struggling with the pressures and isolation of modern life; to admire how much we can accept with good grace. But it also strays repeatedly into fatphobia and the left-hand turn in the final act to a forced subplot involving the rapacious syndicate is an odd change of both pace and tone that I didn't care for. A mixed bag, in the end, but I'm glad I read it.

Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat.

I enjoyed the stories of the various individuals, and they contained elements of magical realism. The translation was wonderfully done and overall, the book was well-written. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

trigger warning
<spoiler> grief, suicide, trauma, knife violence, pet death, fat shaming, misogyny, corruption, cancer, eating disorder, kidnapping, torture, mutilation, queerphobia </spoiler>

There is this guy who is bored at his job, because he has work for roughly half an hour and then has to sit there, doing nothing, for hours. He is so bored that he looks through the office building, and thus he finds the cabinet.

The cabinet is filled with files on people who have weird abilities, kinda like superheroes but more like regular people weird stuff happens to.

This book was weird from beginning to end. The chapters read more like short stories that tie into each other, and it takes for the plot to materialise. The first few chapters at first seem to be very, very unrelated.

If I am honest, it was not the right choice to read a few pages before dropping off to sleep in the evening, but I read the second half in one go as I became aware of this. As I thought I had the book figured out, something happened and it went in an entirely different direction which I did not like at all.

This book has problems with fat-shaming and queerphobia. There is a person who is not able to romantically love, and she is treated as other - as even weirder than a person who has a ginko tree growing from his finger. Of course, it might be that the author, being Korean, is not aware of different queer identities, but still it felt so toxic.

I kept waiting for this to become weird but fun, but the fun level declined even more as I got on.
No recommendation from me.

The arc was provided by the publisher.

Surreal, amazing, and (toward the last chapters, damned unsettling) read. Very quickly, then: A bored young man finds himself "working" in a company full of other bored "workers" - there's literally nothing to do, and when he asks to take on actual responsibilities, he is told by colleagues and supervisors alike to not rock the boat, just ride it out and be grateful for having a job. With nothing else to do, he eventually roams around in search of an escape from boredom, and stumbles upon Cabinet 13, a cabinet full of curiosities in the guise of stories about people undergoing bizarre and quite unlikely life transformations. The works appear to be part of a dubious research project that he begins to oversee, and finds himself asked to take charge of. But mysterious and threatening strangers from "the syndicate" are very interested in the files, and go to incredible lengths to wrest files dealing specifically with chimeras from the hands of our protagonist, in spite of the fact that no such files exist.

The book covers a lot of territory in its four hundred or so pages. The writing is excellent, but I'm still trying to grasp what, if any, message the author was working to convey. Perhaps it's as simple as understanding that, if you've got a good thing going for you, don't go looking to take on something more. I dunno. An entertaining read, either way.

Surreal novel about human evolution and Korean society

Content warning: fatphobia

I received a copy of this eBook courtesy of the publisher.

“The Cabinet” by Un-su Kim and translated by Sean Lin Halbert is a surreal novel about a young man called Mr Kong who works in a dull office job in Korea. One day, out of boredom, he discovers a locked cabinet and when he finally manages to unlock it becomes obsessed with reading the files of people with strange bodies and abilities known as “symptomers”. As Mr Kong becomes more and more involved in their difficult and sometimes annoying lives, he must decide what his ethical obligations are for this possible new species of human.

As I have mentioned on here previously, I am always very interested in biopunk and books that examine the possibilities of genetics and human evolution. Mr Kong spends a considerable amount of time musing on how the symptomers represent the next dominant species and one that will overtake humanity as we know it. I enjoyed the individual vignettes of the individuals who contact him, and Mr Kong’s rather exasperated role as a sort of social worker for these people trying to help solve their impossible situations. I felt that the writing (including Halbert’s translation) was very smooth and captured a sense of corporate absurdism which was both amusing and eminently relatable. I enjoyed Mr Kong’s character development, especially in relation to his ostracised colleague and examining fatphobia and neurodiversity in Korean society and workplaces.

I think where things fell down a bit for me was a lack of internal logic within Kim’s worldbuilding. While individually the case studies of symptomers were interesting, such as the man with a gingko tree growing out of his finger and a people who would disappear and reappear much later into the future, Kim’s explanations for how genetics could cause these things to happen were all but absent. He hints at experimental interference, but I guess for someone who is a bit of a science fiction aficionado, I think I was looking for at least a little bit of effort towards an explanation. Even something as convenient as a “chrono-impairment” genetic disorder or having a new X-gene. I appreciate that this book is less science fiction and more surrealism and social commentary, but I think a bit more consistency to try to link how someone with a lizard in their mouth could possibly be connected with someone who sleeps for years at a time would have helped. I think that ultimately it read more like a collection of short stories tied loosely together by Mr Kong’s observations about corporate culture and inclusivity, and thus lacked cohesion.

A creative and thought-provoking novel that was enjoyable to read even if it at times felt disjointed.

I was unable to put this down! A very interesting, strange, unique book that took a turn I did not see coming at all.

"They are both the last humans and the first of a new kind."

The first chapter hooked me immediately while questioning the symptomers, aka extraordinary people, a new type of humans. The institute, Cabinet 13, the main character works in does research about symptomers who are time skippers, have a doppelganger and such.The cabinet has 375 individual files of them and the main characters are the ones involved in that sector.

This story is strange and intriguing as its story involves the world's rare illness that people can't believe it actually exists. I enjoyed reading these factual circumstances rather than the story itself as I found it a bit confusing how I should consider it. I missed to discover the meaning and point of the plot🙈🙊 I therefore look forward to read other reader's thoughts on this book😉

I really enjoyed this odd little book. Okay, at 400 pages it's maybe not that little, but it felt that way when I was reading it.

Mr. Kong stumbles into the job of looking after the files in Cabinet 13 which contains the stories of people who exhibit weird symptoms. There's a man with a tree growing out of his finger and a former conjoined twin who disengages from her body and buries herself on a regular basis. Other characters are time skippers. Each story ends with a sort of moral. All of it is connected through the narrator's story.

It's unusual. I found it really compelling.

Unfortunately, while I found the novel delightfully quirky, I was not compelled to finish past 40%. The style of the novel was too disjointed for me to be interested in returning to it and the writing style didn’t suit my tastes.

While we do have a main character, he is so very uninteresting and passive that he lacked any sort of draw for me. Likewise, we get so many strange little vignettes that they lack cohesion - I kept wondering what was tying them all together. If something does, it takes far too long for this to happen, because I never happened upon it.

This book is either too weird or too tame for my reading style, or perhaps the oddities just aren’t to my taste. It felt like a wisp of magical realism, rather than the punch of surrealism, and the former genre is one I generally can’t stand.

That being said, I’m still giving it three stars because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the book - it’s just not for me.

The Cabinet is a weird and surreal collection of stories about “Symtomers,” people who develop unique abilities or experience strange phenomena during their lives. These people are thought to be evolving into a new type of species and their files live in Cabinet 13.

I really enjoyed all of the unique traits that the people in Cabinet 13 experience. They were super imaginative and highly entertaining to read about. The book was a bit slow at times and it did take me a bit longer to get through. That being said I did enjoy it and if you are into speculative fiction you will as well. The characters were definitely the stars of this collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the eARC.

Goodness what a difficult book to describe and review, let alone decide if I enjoyed it! It's crazy and surreal yet at its heart is a discussion about humanity and difference and I think I really enjoyed it.
Thank you to netgalley and angry robot for an advance copy of this book

This was an interesting and quirky book - unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

It’s about a man who works in a boring office job. There is nothing at all for him to do at work - until one day he stumbles across a cabinet that he decides to break into just for something to do. The contents of the cabinet contain files on people called ‘symptomers’ - people who exhibit strange symptoms that, in some way or other, call into question their level of ‘normal’ human functionality. (For example, there’s one man who grows a tree out of his finger. One with an actual doppelgänger. A few who literally lose time, or alter their brains to ‘mosaic’ over memories. All sorts of random things, and I won’t spoil the book by listing them all!)

When I began reading, the accounts of the different symptomers made the novel read like multiple small anecdotes. I enjoyed how the story began to interweave but sadly felt that in the second half my attention waned. I was disappointed by the ending and felt that nothing was properly resolved. The various accounts felt in equal parts really interesting and a bit pointless… and eventually I think I was most disappointed in how much potential this had to be amazing. For some reason it just didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for the EARC in exchange for an honest review!

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Angry Robot for a copy of this book of speculative fiction.

Un-su Kim in his novel The Cabinet has written a story about not belonging and loneliness in a society where outsiders are looked at as things to be ridiculed or ignored. Not an original sounding theme for a novel, but one that is told so oddly, so removed that the reader can't help but become immersed in the story. The ending might be problematical to some, but the journey is well worth the trip, even if the destination might not be what the reader expects.

A young man, Kong, works for a corporate think tank, where he has nothing to do at all. One day, he finds a cabinet that is locked and after a time, almost 10,000 possible combinations later he opens the cabinet to find a series of files on what the files call symtomers, people who have bizarre traits and characteristics. These include gasoline drinker, glass eaters, a man with a tree growing out of his hand, etcetera. Sort of like X-Files, only Kong is more bored than driven. For his discovery Kong is made an assistant to Professor Kwon, who alone has overseen the files for years.

The case stories are interesting, more short stories than chapters in a book. The plot really doesn't start going until well past the the halfway point of th novel. As in X-Files there is a sinister group who wishes to know more about the files, and will do anything to get them. Kong's life once so boring is suddenly in danger.

The short story case files are fun and interesting. I would like to have known more about them, or have the whole book just be about the symtomers. The ending like I said is different than I expected. However it fits well with the them of alienation that runs through the book. X-Files fans, David Lynch aficionados might enjoy this book. I enjoyed it but the ending made me want more. This is the second book that I have read by this author, and look forward to more translations of his work.

A nice weird collection of short stories that manages to both do an overarching plot that continues through the stories, almost like they were serialized in a magazine, but manages to stand alone for each short story. The uniting theme is a cabinet of weird mutants, some themes explicitly linking to general feelings/emotions in Korean society, others more obliquely. Definitely worth a read.

Originally published in 2006, Un-su Kim’s The Cabinet is a beautifully structured, lyrical and humorous novel which challenges the binary of the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ with great skill and heart. Full of witticisms and self-conscious asides, the narrator is an excellent conduit for the reader, charming and perplexing in equal measure.

When looking to escape the drudgery of his bureaucratic day job, Mr. Kong comes across a cabinet containing files on a number of ‘unusual’ people. What follows is a story (or, several stories) of quotidian magic, meditations on the tension between what is ‘normal’ and what is happening, and an ode to the primacy of human experience over legal or social process. It feels particularly poignant and appropriate that this translation be published now, at a moment in which the end of the world is, as Kim might have it, speeding up. This is absurdism at its best, Franz Kafka for the 21st century.

I received a digital review copy of this book from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.