During my yearly visit to see my friends and fellow QTL reviewers, we ventured to New York City and escaped the cold, windy day in the OG Barnes & Noble bookstore. I couldn’t help but pick up the eye-catching pink cover of The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim while I was browsing. I discovered that the consequences of opening the cabinet in Kim’s fantastical world include awe, horror, intrigue, and a deeper reflection on the ways we choose to live.
Mr Kong [sic] has a steady paycheck but an unfulfilling job at a research lab. His never-ending boredom propels him to explore the building, leading him to discover a very ordinary cabinet. However, the cabinet’s contents are anything but and instead contain files detailing the extremely odd lives of evolving humans, known as symptomers. Some symptomers have plants growing from their bodies, some are annoyed with their doppelgangers, while others are skipping through time. No matter how strange, the cabinet keeps a record of the interesting abilities and lives of people around the world, and Mr Kong resentfully protects them all.
Your level of curiosity with The Cabinet will depend on how well you can vibe with its unique storytelling. The main thread of this story follows Mr Kong, the salaryman who organizes and guards the cabinet’s symptomers files, but the book loves to go on tangents and zoom in on random lives and experiences of people around the world. From symptomer stories, like the man trying to turn into a cat, to introverted people who are alien radio enthusiasts, Kim breaks from the main story to detail the strange, absurd, and fantastical accounts of the human experience.
The symptomer stories expand on the main story and give context to the strange little world that Mr Kong is caught up in. But not every featured story has a clear connection. These seemingly random vignettes do play a larger role in the book’s theme. There is probably a ton of cultural nuance that went over my head, but I developed a lot of awe for The Cabinet’s ability to honor the variety of weird and beautiful ways humans live. Each random story celebrated the people, or at the very least, sympathized with them. There wasn’t shame associated with the person’s strange desires or any judgment placed on the way they live. The Cabinet felt like a celebration of life, all the good, bad, and ugly. And I felt that the message shared over and over again is that there is no right way to live life, and encourages you to find a way to live that is authentic to you.
There’s beauty to be found when you open The Cabinet, but it also has many horrors. The symptomer stories often honor the way these resilient people have adapted or even come to love their strange abilities, but there are more somber accounts as well. Behind the triumphant support for the people who fall outside of the norm, I also encountered a feeling of helplessness from these people on the fringes. Kim tells stories of symptomers overcome by their experiences and the not-so-happy endings that follow. An abnormal life can be a great source of freedom, and also full of misunderstanding and isolation. Not every symptomer story is a happy one, and the files within the cabinet reveal all.
This unassuming cabinet may look ordinary, but when you pull out the drawer to rifle through the contents within, you’ll find a brilliantly fantastical story that honors all that makes us weird, strange, and completely authentic. I recommend you open The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim to read something utterly unique, enlightening, and maybe, a bit terrifying.
Rating: The Cabinet – 7.0/10
-Brandee
