First impressions review: The Cabinet, by Un-Su Kim

 

This rather surreal novel is built as a mosaic from different stories. It is a little slow to get off the ground, as the reader has to figure out how an escaped prisoner named Ludger Sylvaris relates to “symptomers” – people with strange habits from around the world – and how the narrator got caught up in looking after a cabinet filled with their files. But once that connection is made, the book becomes very engaging and insightful. The ending is suddenly violent and a bit odd…but it DOES tie back to Mr. Sylvaris, so it is indeed part of the whole. You have to have a high tolerance for weird and unexplained – mixed with social commentary - to like this book. Which I do, and I did.

 

The symptomers are described by Professor Kwan as a new step in humanity’s evolution (kind of like the X-men). As a biologist, I feel compelled to point out that evolution in general and punctuated equilibrium specifically doesn’t actually work based on the NEED to evolve – there’s just a constant stream of random mutations, and the environment either favors stability or change depending on the conditions, with the individuals that function best in their environment surviving and reproducing more. There isn’t much evidence of either of those things among the symptomers! However, I’m not really annoyed about this, since it seems unlikely that anyone would think that, say, growing a gingko tree from your finger is a plausible mutation. So I was able to sit back and enjoy the weirdness.

 

In fact, what the symptomers started to reminded me of was ‘The Sane Society’, in which Erich Fromm proposes that society can create mental illnesses, not just by pathologizing normal variation but by failing to provide for psychological needs. This can involve not just a sense of disconnection from one’s work (‘alienation of labor’ as Marx called it), but neighborhoods and social patterns that make genuine connection with others harder too.

 

The first case that made this clear was the bit about the people who go into a state of torpor for months at a time. You can’t do it just by wanting to sleep:“Perhaps the reason we can’t fall into a deep sleep despite being exhausted is because we don’t have the courage to risk losing everything, the courage to act irresponsibly…The entire modern economy is based on anxiety, and, as everyone knows, anxiety is the mortal enemy of a good night’s sleep.” Similarly, there are people who experience time-skips, sometimes of years, as a reflection of how doing the same thing over and over causes your life to pass before your eyes before you know it.

 

There are people who drink gasoline because “It’s the twenty-first century. The age of speed! We need to be able to accelerate at a moment’s notice.” There’s a young man who always disliked how he looked who ends up falling for his own doppelganger. It’s so much easier to love others than to love yourself, especially when you are bombarded with images of the ideal body and life – but what if the other were also yourself? There are people who excise their bad memories, only to find themselves tortured by curiousity at what was in that hole in their life (because, as Rivers Solomon wrote in ‘The Deep’, forgetting is not the same as healing). There’s a woman with a factory job who dissociates her consciousness into a completely new body (which enjoys life and then dies) – alienation of labor in a nutshell! And so on.

 

With this in mind, even the aggressively normal and boring narrator, Mr. Kong, might be a symptomer in his own way, pushed into more and more insane situations by his “sick” society. He pushed himself to pass exams to get a good-paying job only to find himself bored to death with no real work to do. “man my post – this was the extent of my job responsibilities…there are actually lots of jobs like this in the world…Didn’t I jump for joy, you may ask? No.” He starts to fill his time reading the cases in the cabinet and – since this is against the rules and he could get fired – gets roped in as an assistant to the professor who collected them. But then that gets a sinister syndicate interested in him…

 

I’m not quite sure what to think of Jeong-eun, the quiet, plump girl in Mr. Kong’s office who everyone picks on. She is sort of like Mr. Kong, quietly unhappy (and bulimic) and inclined to look to the cabinet for a break from the boredom. But all she seems to DO is give Kong some (admittedly quite necessary) help…and we never find out what happens to her or if she runs into trouble with the syndicate as well. That is a tad of a let down, especially after the talk about how we can be boobytraps for one another.

 

So, the beginning and end (**spoilers**, obviously):

 

Ludger Sylvaris was a prisoner on the Caribbean island of Saint-Pierre who was incarcerated in a tall tower, where the people use him as a kind of psychological scapegoat for all their ills – even though, having been locked up from the age of 16, he couldn’t possibly be the cause of their problems! Then a volcanic eruption wipes out everyone on the island but him, and he escapes. He lives in seclusion for 30 years, and after his death his book about the islanders is published, and it includes all kinds of implausible details. Of course, some of these things seem likely metaphors – especially the bit about seeing that Bishop Desmond and Father Cleore had animal tails, and he saw them playing with each other’s tails, and they saw him…just before they had him arrested! That sounds a lot like the files on the symptomers, doesn’t it?

 

Toward the end of the book, things take a dark turn when Mr. Kong is kidnapped by the syndicate, who are looking for the files they’re sure Professor Kwan had on experimentally-created chimeras. Mr. Kong knows nothing about that, but in the process of confirming that has a bunch of his fingers and toes cut off and then badly reattached. When he has recuperated a bit, he flees the country to an isolated island - much like Ludger Sylvaris. And we find out he’s been telling this story while clearly affected by isolation and PTSD. He says he has a cabinet that is a duplicate of the one in the office…but I have to wonder if he is making up metaphors for the ills of society just as Sylvaris did.