Flatland Review

Overall, like 6/10. Kinda mid. I mean, it's well thought out and everything, but like there wasn't really anything that I gained out of it. I only really read it because I'm a math major and every math major knows about it or something. Yeah, it's more of a mathematical pop culture phenomenon rather than an actually great book.

This will be short because I really don't have much to say about it. I mean, the first half (and mind you this book is like 100 pages) is spent explaining the world of Flatland, and then the second half (which would mean about 50 pages) was this journey of enlightenment that the narrator, who is a 2D square, went on. He was bumped into the third dimension by a (3D) sphere and then unsuccessfully tried to convince the other people of Flatland that there exists a third dimension.

Yeah, I suppose it is a social commentary on Victorian England or whatever time and place that the author wrote it in. Something about lunacy and truth and whatever, whatever. As you can see, I don't really care much for that message. I don't really fuck with society and politics and the like. I concern myself with something a bit more local.

One thing that I will say very briefly about this society is that I think everybody in the novel is just very arrogant. They believe that their beliefs are absolutely correct and that anybody who refutes them are lunatics. I suppose this is a result of a society that really emphasizes the science and mistakenly attributes that with absolute truth. Something like empathy, the Flatlanders (notably the male Flatlanders) would say is a trait that only women (who are mere lines) have, and that no noble polygon would have something as silly as emotion.

Arrogant scholars. Nietzsche says something about this in Beyond Good and Evil, which will be the next book review that I write.

I enjoyed learning about the world of Flatland and how everything worked. Abott really thought this 2-dimensional world through. My favorite part of it was how they used fog as a way of determining depth, and then the quick note afterwards about how color is used to distinguish sides. The world of Lineland was also really funny. Like males having two voices, and then harmonizing with two other females and then magically birthing a baby? Crazy. Genius.

I think the reason why I'm not a huge fan of this book is because none of the ideas are super groundbreaking. I'm a big girl. I can extrapolate. I can imagine what worlds would be like if there were only 2-dimensions. (Also there's this Tiktok that went kind of viral a while ago about a 2D girl and a vault with a gem in it. Someone out here must know exactly what I'm talking about.) If you haven't thought too deeply about this kinds of things, I invite you to read Flatland. Though the first half does read kind of technical and I get that people don't find that exactly fun. It's still interesting, though.