The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He's not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn't sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He's just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age. Which is the miracle of his talent. He has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world, a viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly bejeweled skull, and you value things in the book's context as he does, never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer.