Do I just love genius characters or is this book really that good?

I’ve been reading The Last Samurai (no, nothing to do with Tom Cruise) by Helen Dewitt, and boy is it great. I have been holding back on reading longer books (anything over 400 pages) because I wanted to meet my goodreads goal for the year (i’m not going to anyway) but after reading the sample on this one there was no way I could not buy it. 

In short, it’s about a genius single mother raising her genius son, who starts devouring languages at the age of 4 and speaks half a dozen by the time he is six. It’s scattered with facts about all sorts of things, but mostly linguistics and bits of history/anthropology/sociology. But it’s all kept related to the story in ways that are very clever. 

I can’t stop reading it, and find myself even more motivated to learn more languages. High recommendation and I’m only a bit over halfway through it.