When he isn't writing complex, genre-twisting novels, Umberto Eco is one of the leading scholars of semiotics, a discipline that explores the ways symbol systems (like language) work. All of his fiction, to greater or lesser degree, is an extension of his fascination with the symbol-system of language and its relationship to the people who use it. (The Name of the Rose is a good case in point.) The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is perhaps as close as Eco may ever come to writing an "autobiographical" novel. The main character, a middle-aged Italian who makes his living selling rare books, suffers a memory loss. This provides Eco with the chance to explore the relationship that every individual has to their memories, and to consider whether memory (and our thoughts in general) are truly "personal" or all culturally derived. So this work, with all its gaudy cartoon illustrations, is perhaps the most overtly about the very subject Eco is best versed in (semiotics) and the most clearly anchored in the reality of growing up in Fascist Italy (as Eco himself did). Sure, there's a lot of detail flying by, as there always is in Eco's work, but I found the book uniquely moving. The narrator in this book is not just a clever symbolic construction (like Baudolino) or a trope (the main character in The Name of the Rose is a medieval Sherlock Holmes), but a cartoon stand-in for the author. This might be Eco's greatest novelist achievement. A stunning surprise of a book, and a visual treat.