As a student of linguistics, one comes across an arcane term, ‘semiotics’, and finds it even more interesting than the study of language itself. Digging through the intricacies of semiotics, one can start with the likes of John Locke and Ferdinand de Saussure and come to Roland Barthes and George Lakoff. One finds them all academically inclined and interested in explaining and interpreting the world and the use of signs in it.

The egghead who took semiotics out of the university library shelves and brought it into the world of entertaining fiction was an Italian professor named Umberto Eco. He introduced this little understood field to a wide range of readerships that lapped up his novels such as The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault’s Pendulum (1988).

Umberto Eco, who died on February 19 at the age of 84, was a modern intellectual with the caliber of a renaissance man.

His best known work that attracted the attention of European readers was The Name of the Rose that was also made into an absorbing and haunting movie in 1986 -- with Sean Connery in the lead role of Brother William of Baskerville, investigating a series of suspicious deaths in an Italian abbey in medieval times. This novel was soon translated into many other languages and brought international fame to Eco and established his reputation as a historical-mystery or historical-whodunit writer.

By the time this novel became an international best-seller, Eco was already around 50 years old and had much earlier set his foothold in the world of serious scholarly work. If it is difficult for you to understand how a scholar became a novelist, just think of one of our own erudite Urdu scholars, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who gained fame as a novelist after first establishing himself as an academician. Whereas Faruqi is enthralled by the India of 18^th and 19^th centuries, Eco is immersed in the history of medieval Europe. In Faruqi’s novels and short stories we find more or less accurate historical depiction of real life literary giants of Urdu such as Mir, Ghalib, and Dagh; while Eco’s fiction is replete with references to both real and mythological characters.

Eco’s world is a realm of complicated mystery that draws you in; that is perhaps one of the reasons why his novels have been sold in millions. He was able to debunk the myth that people just want to read simple things. He not only challenged this myth but also proved to be a role model for other writers to come, such as Dan Brown who borrowed heavily from Eco’s style and structure. Brown’s The Da Vinci Code also sold in millions but, if you have read both, you would tend to rate Brown as a poor imitator of Eco.

Once Eco was asked whether he considered himself a professor or a novelist and his reply was "I am a serious professor who writes novels on weekends". A keen interest in ancient, medieval and modern cultures and a deep insight into sights and sounds -- both popular and bourgeois -- remained a life-long preoccupation with Eco. His narrative impulse prompted him to produce high quality writings -- from his doctoral thesis on medieval philosophy to his work as a cultural editor at Italy’s state broadcaster.

His later non-fiction writings focused more on aesthetics and the history of art, most prominently in his two books On Beauty and On Ugliness. It seems that he wanted to understand and explain how people’s perceptions are shaped through history. Arguably no other writer -- perhaps with the exception of George Lakoff -- has helped change academia’s approach to literature by studying popular art forms with such expertise as Eco has done. But even Lakoff’s work is more concerned with metaphors, especially his book Metaphors We Live By (1980), which is a required reading in most linguistics programmes in Pakistan too.

If you are interested in the history of beauty and ugliness in arts and literature, Eco’s books On Beauty: A History of Western Idea (2004) and its sequel On Ugliness (2007) may come as a delight to you; though the sequel is not for the squeamish and the prude. Probably it is not fair to club them with art history books, since they are much more than mere history. They are encyclopedias of images and ideas about the concepts of beauty and ugliness from ancient Greece to the present day.

One marvels at the painstaking research Eco must have done to glean and reproduce hundreds of paintings and photographs with an enormous range of cultural icons. Then there are hundreds of pages of quotations form philosophers and writers (who wouldn’t love to read from sages ranging from Plato and Boccaccio to Milton and Goethe?).

Dealing with beauty and ugliness, Eco produces sourcebooks with commentaries upon the chosen texts but the second book has more literature in it than the first which is relatively art-focused. If you are not into witchcraft, Satanism, sadism, the diabolic and the obscene, you may stay away from the second book. But then perhaps you are not interested in understanding culture, which Eco wanted to see and present in its entirety, with warts and all.

Just for the uninitiated, one final suggestion. If you are not sure about spending money on his books, you may begin by watching film The Name of the Rose based on his novel. If it sharpens your taste buds and creates some curiosity, go and plunge into Eco’s oeuvre. If you have loved to read Manto and take pride in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s brutal unmasking of cultural hypocrisy, rest assured Eco will not disappoint you.