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I will start my own brief multi-dimensional romance on this book - but dangerously, perhaps, exploring elements of my own experiences out into Spaceland that led me back, like Abbott, to my home-sweet-home of Flatland - with a caveat that I am a rather odd duck.

Being born with ASD didn't help at all.

We Aspies, like Supertramp, always Take the Long Way Home. The prolonged ingenuous Springtime of The Soul. And the soul rejoices in the bright laughter of - as Mallarme says, the "Jeu Suprême" - as all reality curls up comfortably at its Ironic Edges.

But the simplicity of higher mathematics in high school soon became in my eyes an overgrown jungle. It was, to me, unworkable, because we Aspies come from a psychological Flatland: to the world, Dullsville.

So my apologies at the outset to my GR friends who were math majors.

No, I took this book at a personal EXISTENTIAL level! So please: take this review very much with a grain of salt!
***

As you probably know, I like to often change the subject. My adventures in Spaceland taught me that when my interlocutors dug deep, their interjections were to me like speeding bullets. I dodged them: I knew they would spell my mediocre death-in-life: I didn't want to go there.

Didn't even want to go to Spaceland - no - but the philosophical skills my teenaged reading skills gave me PUSHED me into a sophisticated outer spaceland.

That sophistication fed my nascent knowledge.

So when I went to college, I explored Spaceland heuristically. And of course - that path leads us into the Den of the Minotaur.

Yikes.

Anyway, after King Minos' foul beast had thoroughly chewed me up and expectorated me... alone, I found myself back home in Flatland!
***

An awakening refused leads back to simplicity, as Abbott found -

And it's where I am now writing this:

In "a state of simplicity (which cost me) not less than EVERYTHING."

And won me Flatland forever...

Flatland - AKA God's Peace - a patient, silent witness to an Ugly World.

I'm my reviews, I'm a precious prima donna who always sings her heart out, and who picks up every last one of the mountains of roses cast atop her.

But in real life I'm a frightfully well-medicated old buzzard of a senior citizen who cherishes every moment of his obscurely FLAT life.

Classic Freudian Wish Fulfilment!

And that's my Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
***

Well, that was my ASD take on this playful novel.

Had I been born a much more scrupulous mathematical man, I would have seen the ironic logic of the book Totally Differently.

So now let's hear, for you more learned folks, a mathematician's explanation of why we are fated to always return to Flatland (a Much better simple take than mine, but then, I dropped Math in High School)!