LibraryThing predicted with HIGH CONFIDENCE that I probably would not like this book, but in a weird way, I did. I do not object to dystopian novels. This one was sort of mind-bending (as opposed to mind-flattening which, if you read the book, you will understand what I mean by that). It is a commentary on Victorian Era society, and how one must go out of the lines (or squares, polygons, circles, and triangles) to find truth. There is a realm beyond how we have been taught to see it, and we need to be open to realms unknown. Sometimes who buck the trend (or societal class norms) are sometimes persecuted for doing so.
I do think I liked it.
Here is what the author of 1000 Books to Read Before You Die says: A novel of mathematical whimsy, Flatland is set in the peculiar world that provides the book’s name and is home to its putative author, A. Square, a two-dimensional being in a world inhabited by lines, triangles, circles, and polygons. Ingeniously composed as a kind of dystopian memoir, Flatland is a stunning piece of social satire, depicting with great acuity the gender and class distinctions of Victorian Britain. Abbott’s notions about the larger conundrums posed by different dimensions and their relationships to one another were ahead of their time, mathematically speaking, but the enduring fascination of his fable is its depiction of the perils of making the world simpler than it is, no matter how elegantly provable that simplicity may seem.
No comments:
Post a Comment