Instant Karma, Mark Swartz, City Lights: 136...

Instant Karma, Mark Swartz, City Lights: 136 pp, $11.95 paper

Welcome to the oddball world of David Felsenstein, a Chicago loner who’s part Young Werther, part Travis Bickle and part post-adolescent Borges. David is a self-described “biblioclast” who roams the Harold Washington Public Library pondering the subtle differences between collecting and borrowing, and his flitting observations are ably presented by Mark Swartz as the first-person scrapbook of a disjointed mind: David’s diary includes reflections -- quite amusing, mostly -- on everything from Sartre (only college boys read him) to the film “1941” (Belushi was awesome); references to Joyce, Buddhism and an obscure lesbian alcoholic Communist actress; asides on how to stir-fry fish heads; and frequent tangents on Eve Jablom, the foxy librarian. Ah, young bookworms in love, you might suspect. Not quite. When David isn’t sniffing out musty arcana and trying to catch Eve’s eye, he’s out setting fire to American flags and plotting to blow his beloved library -- and tortured self -- to smithereens.

“Instant Karma” is a kind of Dewey Decimal tribute to Paul Auster’s “Leviathan.” Its would-be terrorist is, like Auster’s mad bomber, a romantic flake, not some insidious fundamentalist. It’s a quaintly reassuring perspective, and this curious book manages to be a page-turner despite its hackneyed, postmodern contrivances. What we’re left with, weirdly, is an essentially harmless tale about a raging psycho.

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, Blake Morrison, HarperCollins: 272 pp., $23.95

JOHANN Gutenberg, ne Gensfleisch (Gooseflesh), the creator of the printing press, the greatest invention since the wheel, is the subject of this engaging first novel from Blake Morrison, a veteran British poet and editor. It’s an appropriately dazzling saga that evokes the exceedingly human inventor of a heretical machine that, in its time, seemed no less than a challenge to God himself. This “justification,” as Gutenberg tells us, is an effort to “wash my inky linen in public,” and what follows is an old man’s recollections of his journeyman life: growing up in a thriving, upper-class house in Mainz, a scholarly boy drawn, inexplicably, to lowlier trades. Most of his young life is spent roving the continent, working as an apprentice for this guild and that, frequenting the soothing ladies of the bathhouses and slowly nurturing a radical idea inspired by witnessing a wine press at work (in vino veritas, indeed). Every page of Morrison’s life of Gutenberg is stamped with startling observations: from the trivia that 15th century ink was made from oak apples to the grisly ratio of cow carcasses to sheets of vellum. The sum is magic, but there’s no abracadabra here, just a wonderfully flawed and conniving guy who “invented a thing more explosive than gunpowder.”

Disturbance of the Inner Ear, Joyce Hackett, Carroll & Graf: 288 pp., $25

An ultra-rare cello from the 1560s; 77-year old Signor Perso, dead in a Milan hotel room; Giulio Salvagente, a well-heeled Milanese plastic surgeon and, it turns out, gigolo; Clayton Pettyward, a 14-year-old who eats dog biscuits and happens to be the spoiled son of an American diplomat; and, finally, the wayward American Isabel Masurovsky, former cello prodigy and daughter of a Jewish pianist who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia by playing for the Nazis. Isabel is at the heart of Joyce Hackett’s fractured and dissonant symphony of a novel, with its hypnotic themes of survival, betrayal and exile. Discovering just how out-there the Old World can be, Isabel is the one in possession of the cello, the former lover of the late Signor Perso, the current obsession of the thoroughly creepy Giulio and the long-suffering teacher of the musically challenged Clayton.

Line by line, Hackett’s ear is impressive. But her multilayered enterprise never quite stacks up, and its mad-dash final movement, in which Isabel races to Theresienstadt in a stolen Alfa Romeo, is ultimately, like this impressive yet flawed novel, as baffling as it is affecting.