The Cabinet, by Un-su Kim, is such a strange novel, I scarcely know how to review it.

Our wise-cracking narrator, Mr. Kong, works in a job where he is paid to do very little work. But not wanting to disturb the peace, and at the advice of his co-workers, he does not complain or bring any attention to his situation. One day, he stumbles on a cabinet, Cabinet 13, full of reports regarding Symptomers, humans with strange and unique gifts, such as slowly turning into gingko trees, missing years of their life in a second, and those who regularly drink gasoline and survive.

Cabinet 13 is owned by the mysterious and ailing Professor Kwon, and Kwon employs Kong to help him with his unique research. As the years go by, they encounter many Symptomers, and Kong grows increasingly attached to his work, and his subjects. However, there are dark forces wishing to use Professor Kwon’s findings for their own gain. When Kwon passes away, Kong finds himself in more trouble than he ever could have imagined.

The Cabinet is an award-winning novel in the author’s native South Korea, but I found Un-su Kim’s meandering style a little maddening. While there are some genuinely interesting and funny moments, there is also a lot of philosophizing, and possibly some political satire that went completely over my head.

I also took exception to the one female character in the novel, Jeong-eun, who is nothing more than an extended, unfunny riff on overweight, single women. There were at least two extended sections on Jeong-eun’s appearance and demeanor, and pretty much no detail about the narrator’s appearance. While I understand this is supposed to reflect on the character rather than the writer, it didn’t exactly endear me to either.

The climax of the book was pretty satisfying, and well-paced, but the middle of the book just seemed to drag. There are things to enjoy about this novel, but the whole reading experience was mostly disappointing.

Delightfully magical. I love the idea of 'symptomers'. Un-sun Kim has created a magical world. The final part lost me a little, it's very different to the rest of the book and the ending falls a little flat but overall loved it.

the cabinet has an interesting premise – it reminded me a bit of strange beasts of china, which i loved, so i had high hopes for this one as well. unfortunately, it didn’t reach my expectations. i wish the book was shorter, because it eventually lost my attention and i almost dnf-ed a couple of times.

i cannot comment on the writing itself as this is a translation, but i felt the humor was a bit forced. the main character had an interesting voice – he was perpetually bored of every single thing in his life until cabinet 13 came his way. the short stories about the symptomers were, over-all, pretty fun to read, but i think they didn’t fully commit to being /weird/. some of them were kinda boring and i wish the book went the whole way and turned the stories into something actually weird, but alas. i, for no particular reason, loved the story about the man with the ginko tree growing from his finger. it stuck out to me.

alternating with the short stories were parts about the main character’s life. i didn’t hate these parts about mr. kong, but i can’t say i enjoyed them either. i think he’s written as a very relatable character to those that work in an office – since most of his story revolves around office drama. the ending did not fit in with the rest of the story and i honestly didn’t like it at all.

overall, the cabinet is definitely worth reading because it’s a fun read, i just had higher hopes – more weirdness!

thank you to netgalley for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review!

This is an interesting work of literary fiction - basically interconnected short stories revolving around the Cabinet, a collection of files on unusual people. I think I preferred the early to mid portion of the book to the ending, but overall, it kept my interest and was very interesting.

To put it simply, The Cabinet is one of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time - it’s creative and completely unlike anything i’ve read, with a cast of peculiar characters, who all have a file in ‘the Cabinet’.
I’d say the overarching theme is one of acceptance, which I enjoyed, although I think the central plot occasionally faded a little and lacked prominence.
If you’re looking for a quick read, that appears to be very well translated, and you something completely original, you’ll find The Cabinet a lot of fun.

This book was absolutely fascinating and weird and to be completely honest, I have a hard time detailing my thoughts about it.

The book starts as a series of seemingly unrelated anecdotes about "symptomers," people who have evolved mysteriously beyond what is perceived as "normal" for humans. Eventually we learn that our protagonist is an ordinary officer worker named Kong Deok-geun who one day finds Cabinet 13, an inconspicuous cabinet where files on these "symptomers" are stored and begins reading them. What follows is more vignettes each with some kind of moral at the end mixed with hints of a plot surrounding Mr. Kong's daily life and his interactions with his mentor, Professor Kwon.

This definitely will not be for everyone. The plot is pretty much nonexistent and the main characters aren't especially likable. That being said, I really enjoyed it. A few of the vignettes were a miss for me and the number of them sometimes made me question the purpose of the book, making the novel feel longer than its 400 pages. That being said, the writing was beautiful and the chapters that resonated with me really resonated. I particularly loved all of the commentary on office culture and existence in the modern world.

I like magical realism and the type of fantasy that just peppers a little magic into everyday life. This is what I expected to find here. There is that, but there is way of looking at the world which I couldn't align with and that made it hard for me to engage in the book. It's as if it kept the weird but threw out any sense of whimsical - which is usually what I seek.
I particularly disliked the main character, his cold attitude even though I am sure it is not meant to be read that way, and the cruelty found in that book. There is a very detached way of looking at the body that repelled me and an accepting even welcoming of casual suffering that I didn't enjoy.
It is sad because there are a lot of interesting ideas and a multitude of possibilities and stories... but just not for me. This is kind of the contrary to uplifting.
If you are fans of Korean cinema, especially the strange and darker twists and spins they can put on things, if you are looking for a pinch of "Parasites", or a different take on Misfits, this might be more in your cord.

Un-su Kim's The Cabinet is a mosaic novel that blends numerous genres and influences such as fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, magic realism, and others, all told in the form of an I-novel.

The story of the main character's relationship with the eponymous cabinet and its contents is interlaced with stories about the unique subjects within it. Some of them grow trees out of their hands, others want to become cats, while third drink petrol. What all of them share in common, apart from the fact that they are considered to be the next step in human evolution, is the fact that they don't seem to fit in Korean society. This leads to me to believe that the book is supposed to be an allegory about contemporary society in Korea and the way it's designed to thwart any sense of individuality and uniqueness. However, it ends up quite short of that, not due to the beautiful translation, mind you, but because of the writing itself.

Nevertheless, The Cabinet is a very interesting and quick read that's at least as eclectic as the awesome cover.

When reading books, enjoyment comes on many levels. Sometimes it is the thrilling, exciting storyline that catapults you to the end of the story. Other times, it is a pensive excitement that causes you to think about the subject matter or the ideas encapsulated within the book. Or it may be the happiness of the narrative that bounces you along right to the end and leaves you all happy and smiling

When it comes to The Cabinet by Un Su Kim, I am not sure where my enjoyment actually lies.

I think that the best assessment is that my enjoyment was multifaceted and it went through the whole spectrum. Intially, starting at enjoyment and the pleasure of reading the funny, surreal universe that Un Su Kim describes. However, by the end I found myself going through many different emotions including boredom, uncomfortableness, admiration and by the end thankfulness that I have finally finished. Now, you could say that at any point I could have thrown in the towel with the book and added it to the DNF pile, but it wasn't that I disliked the book, far from it in fact! I mean how could you not like a book that has this level of wit.

"French prisons treated prisoners like fine wine. Just as wine is aged in dark, damp cellars, criminals are aged in dark, damp cells until they become sweet and tart. But in Saint-Pierre, they treated prisoners like wet laundry or fish to be dried."

There is much to admire about The Cabinet. It is witty, surreal, at times downright laugh out loud hilarious. On the other hand, I had difficulty determining the point of the constant stream of vignettes describing the Symptomers that make up the content of the book.

Symptomers are what Cabinet 13 revolves around, and Is best described as a series of cases that our narrator, Deok-geun, kind of falls into managing after being employed at a research centre, which he is employed to do basically absolutely nothing. In order to relieve, the boredom, he breaks into Cabinet 13. This leads him to meeting Professor Kwon, who has a pretty fearsome reputation, especially as he beat someone about the face and neck with a cane, and subsequently blackmails him into working for him personally.

Now, as I have said, the book is a series of vignettes concerning the different Symptomers, and their various oddities, like the man who has a Ginkgo Tree growing out of his of finger, or Time Skippers, who lose a periods of time

However, loosely tying together these endless little pieces is the story of our narrator, which kind of runs side by side with the individual stories.

Deok - geun' s story is as equally odd as the people that he looks after. He's kind of a feckless individual, with no particular direction in life at all. I can't say he's very nice, but on the other hand, he looks after the Symptomers, whilst it is with a kind of disdainful reluctance, he does look after them.

Like I said, it's very difficult to describe how I actually felt with this book. At times I enjoyed it, at times I didn't. Other times I wanted it to end.There is no doubt the Un Su Kim is a brilliant writer. I mean, there was one particular scene that had me squirming in my seat in its uncomfortableness. And a grisly torture scene that was pretty creepy to its sterile description.

I found that underneath the surreal inanity, there is a large streak of melancholy running underneath the whole story. Un Su Kim bases his book on individuals who are ultimately lonely in their existence. Even Deok - geun is a sad lonely individual that lives a meagre existence. At one point, he describes how he and his girlfriend stopped being on a relationship, and he finds out she is married.

On the whole Sean Lin Halbert does a really good job of translating the text. However, unfortunately, at times there were some translational mistakes, but this may be picked up in the corrected proof.

A mercurial collection of stories about oddballs that are united by a filing cabinet and one very bored office worker. For example, there is the girl with a small lizard embedded in her tongue. The lizard gets to eat a little of said tongue each day, both to nourish it and give it room to grow, until one day the girl can only eat what the lizard prefers, insects and such. I really enjoyed this as my first ever piece of Korean literature. I’ll be on the lookout for more translations.

The Cabinet acts as an anthology of "symptomers" people who experience oddities, weird occurrences or powers. These stories are filed in the cabinet and told to you through the eye of the cabinets keeper, while weaving an overarching moral tie-in. I really enjoyed the tone of this book, The narrator reminded me a lot of Ford Perfect from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Having the narrator tell you the stories made the book feel cohesive and lent its self to the overarching plot of the book that kept you interested as the story moved foreword.
the book is quirky, existential creepy and funny. I think its a fast paced worthwhile read.

This is OK. It may have lost something in translation or cultural differences. I like short stories, and while the author has a fantastic imagination, the stories just didn't resonate with me. I like it enough that I'd give the author another chance if one becomes available.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

This is a strange book. It contained some beautiful vignettes, and I loved the first part, but after that it fell flat for me, I think because it tried to do too much. It was funny at times, but disturbing too. It started full of magical realism, but it ended like a thriller. Tone switches like that aren't necessarily bad of course, but they didn't work for me unfortunately.

Oh my. This collection of anecdotal wonders seemed both extraordinarily inventive and slightly pointless to me, both at once. I was left impatient by the perky-yet-detached narrative voice as it reminded me of the default voice of many other contemporary writing inventions that I’ve read recently so it could just be bad timing that I didn’t enjoy this more.

Curious.
This book is, entirely, curious.
I don’t even know what I think about it, so curious it is.
A cabinet, it surely is. Or perhaps more like the drawer under my sink, filled with useful things and odd things and things I don’t want to lose but don’t yet have a home. Trinkets of life. Sometimes broken.
Small nuggets of strangeness heap up through the course of the book, which starts as a collection of weirdness set in the normality of day-to-day office life, then climbs into the garb of… a thriller… perhaps.
There were moments of beautiful strangeness, and moments of more suburban weird. Occasionally it was funny, sometimes it felt cruel. It made a slightly unexpected foray into the type of brutal that might make you wince.
Did it work? I’m not entirely sure.
But it’s the sort of book that I wanted to talk to people about, wanted to know what they thought.
The sort of book where you open it, point, say ‘did you see that’?
Or is that the drawer under my sink again?
A curious cabinet, for sure.
ARC gratefully received from Angry Robot and Netgalley

This is an intriguing novel - but it isn't particularly engrossing. It's a collection of interlinked short stories which, sadly, are never quite bizarre enough.

The whole thing has an air of "magical realism" - after accidentally maiming himself, a woodworker slowly turns into a wooden puppet. The sort of thing which I find works quite well in flash fiction, but there isn't enough momentum to sustain a short story. At times it feels like wading through a dreamscape of half-remembered impossible situations.

Each story is a fun or weird little vignette of a strange happenstance. Sort of like a Fortean Times article. But it never quite ties together in a cohesive whole. The original won the 2006 Munhakdongne Novel Award but I can't help but wonder if something got lost in translation.

In the end, I was left nonplussed. Without anything to tie the stories together or any overarching theme it feels a little humdrum. The end descends into a weird torture session which feels completely out of step with the rest of the book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The English version is available from September.

I requested this book because I loved Un-su Kim's novel 'The Plotters' which was a very original, yet relatively straightforward Korean crime novel.

This one is much weirder. It is creative, original, strange and crazy, but at the same time extremely readable. It has a whole cast of bizarre characters called 'symptomers', i.e. humans that have started to evolve in different ways in reaction to the circumstances of our species that have radically changed over the past decades. Some skip time, others eat steel and others yet have gingko trees growing from their fingers. On all of these ‘symptomers’ there is a file in 'the Cabinet' where our main character works.

Perhaps the underlying message is to be open-minded and not dismiss people who are a bit different from the rest. Or perhaps there is no underlying message, I don't really care, because I enjoyed the stories and the good writing as such. However, I did find myself wondering repeatedly what the point was of reading these stories. It would have been nice if the central plot had been more prominent - now only two-thirds in things start to make (some) sense - although the overarching storyline wasn't too convincing (unless somebody can at some point share huis eyeopening perspective - that's the problem of ARCs: there are relatively few people or reviews to consult).

Overall very readable also thanks to what seems to be an excellent translation.

Many thanks to Angry Robot and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

I was expecting a much weirder book than what it turned out to be and I was a bit "bored" through some of the stories. I liked the writing style and I thought the overall idea was great just not my taste. I also thought it was a tad too long.

Overall, a great read. Solid book and it was enjoyable!

A mysterious cabinet in a nondescript office building contains files about symptomers, some say the next evolutionary stage of homo sapien. A man who has a ginkgo tree growing out of his hand, the people who lose time or those that sleep through days and months, or for whom the crocodile under the bed is real.

Towards the end Un-su Kim introduces a sense of menace when the Syndicate begins to take an interest in the files for nefarious reasons.

Fantastical, quirky and unusual, like a collection of short stories and interspersed with the life and musings of Mr Kong, the reluctant custodian of Cabinet 13.

My thanks to NetGalley and Angry Robot for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn't finish this book, unfortunately, but I read most of it. At times it was boring and at times weird and funny, however... The fatphobia in here got to me. The characters in the book are not described much in terms of their looks, unless they are fat or Black, and after reading a whole chapter about a woman who was described as chubby, sluggish, slow, unlovable, laughable... just to enter into a new chapter where a depressed man is told to just lose some weight and become better looking so he can find love. Yea, I'm out of here. Thanks to netgalley and the publisher, but this book is not for me.