3.0
The Cabinet
By Un-su Kim & Sean Lin HalbertPublisher Description
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 ]
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 ]
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities12 Reviews
3.0
BethanyB
Created 29 days agoShare
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“I've never read anything quite like this novel. I wasn't always captivated by it and I actually had to come back and restart it a couple of times before finishing it. Now that I have, I'm definitely glad I did, but I think it's one of those books that I appreciate more on the other side of it than I did during the actual reading of it. This book will give you whiplash, jumping abruptly from whimsically sardonic to horrifically grotesque to achingly earnest. It will probably make you say "Huh...???" out loud more than once. It will likely make you wince and cringe, but also giggle. You might find yourself a fraction of the way in thinking, "am I really going to read this..?" But I can certainly say that if you do, you'll be thinking about it for a long time.”klerneps
Created about 1 month agoShare
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Rixt 🍁🐈⬛
Created 3 months agoShare
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“I was struggling reading this book: to find meaning in it, a point, something to where all the stories would lead. I haven’t found it yet, maybe I have to think about it some more. The MMC was annoying, misogynistic and frustratingly passive. I did like to read the chapters about the symptomers. But why put a cute little black cat on the cover and multiple times in the book, WHEN THERE IS NO CAT IN THE STORY! Sorry, this makes me the angriest 😖
I am glad to have finished this book, because I’ve been wanting to read it for some time and because I put it down for C for my alphabet challenge. But I would not recommend this.”Lindsay_BookTok📚
Created 3 months agoShare
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“One of my more niche recommendations for people. I love this story. If you are in a slump and need a little something to get you through this will help.”Lumi
Created 4 months agoShare
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“At first, this book was rather engaging. The chapters are short and feel like wonderous anecdotes, full of characters that make you think about what's making us human. Then it goes on and on, the characters it introduces feel more random and I started to question if this book knew where it wanted to be going...
And then the ending hits. And all my good will left, the sudden brutality came totally out of nowhere and went equally nowhere. The book left me feeling confused, angry, miserable and more than a little sad to have given this my time.
It doesn't help that the MMC really sucked. He's judgemental, condescending, fatphobic, full of self-pity and constantly complains about his life though he does nothing to change it.
The overall story about the Cabinet really didn't go anywhere. "Capitalism = life draining" and "humanity = ood, and yet beautiful and ever evolving" are nice themes, but the plot barely manages to hold the random examples of cases together.
Also: there are no cats. Which would have been my biggest disappointment if the ending hadn't been so horrible, that I was glad no cat had been dragged into this mess.”About Un-su Kim
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.
Other books by Un-su Kim
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