[downtowndude]

It is on my reread list as well. (But then so is Moby-Dick.) It is the conspiracy novel to end all conspiracy novels (no, The Illuminati trilogy doesn't count, this is at a whole different level) and I think Eco's best. One less obvious satirical level at which it works (to expand on what Bjorn says) is on the infighting amongst semioticians (at a time that the West was discovering Bakhtin and rediscovering Peirce, but that's just one side of the story), a topic Eco knows professionally as well as anyone. Which in turn makes for much epistemological play.