The Cabinet

Name: The Cabinet
Brand: Penguin Random House
Availability: InStock
Author: Un-su Kim
ISBN: 9780857669704

Author: Un-su Kim

Narrator: Jun Hwang

Unabridged: 10 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Angry Robot

Published: 10/12/2021

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction, Humorous Fiction

Synopsis

Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize.

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.

A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists.

Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

File Under: Fiction [ 12,000 Cans of Beer | Memory Mosaicers | Will Execution Inc. | Monkey of All Bombs ]

About The Author

Un-Su Kim made his debut as a writer in 2002 through the Jinju News Fall Literary Contest with short stories, Easy Breezy Writing Class and Dan Valjean Street and the 2003 DongA Ilbo Spring Literary Contest with his mid-length novel Farewell, Friday. His first full-length novel The Cabinet received the 12th Munhakdongne Novel Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lark on August 14, 2021

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......more

Goodreads review by Paul on July 10, 2021

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 fa......more

Goodreads review by Alexander on October 21, 2022

Everything about The Cabinet makes it sound like the perfect kind of book for me: it sounds monumentally quirky, and seems to be told in short story-ish format. I mean, look at this line from the introduction: "All the information contained in the novel has been manufactured, modified, or distorted i......more

Goodreads review by Ola on October 11, 2021

5/10 stars My full review on my blog. Among my recent reads this novel turned out to be the strangest one; for me, it resembles mostly an early attempt at a Frankenstein’s monster: sewn together from disparate parts it ends up having three arms, one leg, and an off-color head tacked on back to front.......more

Goodreads review by David on November 05, 2021

Trust me, you don't know where this one is going. We open with Ludger Sylbaris, the lone survivor of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee who escaped to Mexico where he posthumously wrote a book about the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre spouting badger tails, or having two penises. Is this early evidence of......more

Quotes

“The Cabinet is a sly, whimsical satire of life in late-stage capitalism, slippery and surreal... a kind of echoing chamber in which the comic, heartbreaking and terrifying bounce against, amplify and distort one another."
- Amar El-Mohtar , The New York Times

"[A] brilliant mosaic novel...These stories straddle the lines between science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, and acute reality."
- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Deftly translated by award-winning Halbert, Kim’s latest import...again showcases his sly, surreal, dark humor about all the ways humans are, well, not particularly human."
– Booklist

"What begins as a rather whimsical set of stories turns into a much darker novel, raising issues of difference and acceptance, what people must do to survive, and what is truly monstrous."
– the Guardian

"Surprising and enchanting"
– The Washington Post

"Un-su Kim is a tremendous writer."
– Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan

"This charming and fantastical book is sure to introduce Kim to a whole new legion of weird fiction fans, ideal for readers of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the works of Haruki Murakami."
– Chicago Review of Books

"The Cabinet is an anti-capitalist narrative at its core, one that makes explicit the arbitrariness of capitalist expectations and assumptions. Kim deftly juggles both macro-level and micro-level ideas about social roles, purpose, and personal narrative. More of a thought experiment than a thriller, The Cabinet is a lighthearted, amusing read that nonetheless dives into some deep philosophical topics."
– Strange Horizons