SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA

By Jaroslav Kalfar

276 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $26.

All new books, but debut novels especially, are blind dates. The raconteur who charmingly burbles during drinks is tapped out of stories by the time the oysters arrive; the genius who wears his erudition so lightly over appetizers starts clubbing you over the head with it during dessert. (No, your mind screams when things turn. And it was all going so well.)

I start a lot of debut novels in this job. Most betray me at some point or another — though a few make my heart do cartwheels, or at least a pirouette.

Jaroslav Kalfar’s “Spaceman of Bohemia” is not a perfect first effort. But it’s a frenetically imaginative one, booming with vitality and originality when it isn’t indulging in the occasional excess. Kalfar’s voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks. He has a great snout for the absurd. He has such a lively mind and so many ideas to explore that it only bothered me a little — well, more than a little, but less than usual — that this book peaked two-thirds of the way through. Sigh. Don’t we all.

The cast of this production is small. The spaceman of the title is Jakub Prochazka, a Czech astrophysicist who, as the book opens in 2018, launches into space from a state-owned potato field. Just 18 months earlier, a comet from a neighboring galaxy had swept into the Milky Way, bringing with it a cloud of intergalactic dust that permanently “bathed Earth’s nights in purple zodiacal light, altering the sky we had known since the birth of man.”