Un tal Lucas no es un libro de cuentos, ni es una novela, ni es una obra miscelánea. Es un libro de Julio Cortázar. Es decir, se trata de un itinerario espiritual de lo cotidiano, de una carta de navegación ciudadana llena de guiños, de picardías, de señas dirigidas al lector como una invitación a participar en el juego. Un juego que aquel podrá comenzar por donde quiera, abriendo el libro por donde lo desee, saltando sus páginas. Quizá porque este Lucas -trasunto asistemático de un tal Cortázar- ha hecho todo lo que tenía que hacer y se detiene de vez en cuando para dejar, benévola o malignamente, constancia de algo de lo que ha hecho. Caprichosamente, sí, pero también con el admirable rigor de quien fue, en verdad, un maestro.

Sospecho que Lucas es, en realidad, un pato. ( )

Julio sigue jugando a escribir pero jugando en serio, libro no apto para los estructurados, para los que luego van a ver en historias de cronopios y famas un libro similar y desproticaran contra la hermosura que no saben ver porque te quiebra el esquema, te rompe el molde, te desordena la cabeza.

Textos de todo tipo: hilarantes, bellos, delicados, elocuentes pueblan estas paginas, desenmarañando a Lucas, mostrandonos un tipo de mil matices, de complejas formas de ser.

Siempre en goodreads encontras bellisimas reseñas de los libros del Julio, gente que se da cuenta de lo que es el y les hace describir con pasion lo que sintieron al leerlo

En fin que escritor que fuiste Julio, bienaventurados los que te aman por completo ( )

Tras el nombre de Lucas se oculta un tal Julio que se explaya sobre sus pianistas favoritos, la vida de algunos artistos excéntricos, las costumbres de ciertas familias argentinas, el amor y los amigos.Transgresor inagotable, también ofrece consejos para lustrarse los zapatos, escribir poemas reversibles, dar conferencias, hacerse echar a patadas de un concierto o nadar en una pileta de gofio. Más que un libro de ficciones, éste es un verdadero manual contra la solemnidad.
Autor de Rayuela, Julio Cortázar es uno de los grandes escritores en lengua española de todos los tiempos. Sus cuentos se encuentran entre los más perfectos del género.

A Certain Lucas by Argentina’s Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) – Novella as hydra-headed microfictions, over three dozen, allowing us to glimpse the inner workings of a most unusual character who takes on the roles alternately of protein artist, avant-garde musician, surrealist writer, avid reader, extraterrestrial intruder, cultural critic, lucid dreamer, not-so-domesticated worker and technicolor explorer. Sound wild? It is wild. As a way of cutting certain slices of A Certain Lucas as if carving from a kaleidoscopic pumpkin pie, I offer the following excerpts as a special sampling, along with my occasional comments and prose poem:

THE FATE OF EXPLANATIONS
Somewhere there must be a garbage dump where explanations are piled up.
One disquieting thing in the proper panorama: what would happen on the day someone also succeeds in explaining the dump.

Go for it, Julio! Your Lucas is chock-full of explanations, clarifications, elucidations, descriptions and detail after glorious detail.


LUCAS, HIS STUDIES ON A SOCIETY OF CONSUMERS
Since progress knows-no-limits, in Spain they sell packages that contain thirty-two boxes of matches (tapers, as they say), each of which displays the gaudy reproduction of a complete chess set.
Very swiftly, a wise gentleman put on the market a chess set whose thirty-two pieces can serve as coffee cups; almost immediately the Bazar Dos Mundos turned out coffee cups that allow rather flabby ladies a variety of sufficiently rigid bras, after which Yves Saint Laurent has just brought out a bra in which two soft-boiled eggs can be served in a most suggestive manner.
What a pity that up till now no one has found different application for soft-boiled eggs, a thing that disheartens those who eat them between great sighs; that’s the way certain chains of happiness are broken and remain only in chains and quite dear, it might be said in passing.


LUCAS, HIS COMMUNICATIONS
Since he not only writes but likes to go over to the other side and read what others write, Lucas is surprised sometimes at how difficult it turns out to be for him to understand some things. It isn’t that they’re questions that are particularly abstruse (a horrible word, thinks Lucas, who tends to heft them in the palm of his hand and familiarize himself with them or reject them depending on the color, the smell, or the touch), but suddenly there’s something like a dirty pane of glass between him and what he’s reading, whence impatience, forced rereading, imminent explosion, and finally the great flight of the magazine or book against the nearest wall with a subsequent fall and a damp plop.


LUCAS, HIS SHOESHINES 1940
Lucas in the shoeshine parlor off the Plaza de Mayo, put black polish on my left shoe and yellow polish on the right one. What? Black here and yellow here. But sir. Here’s where you put the black, kid, and that’s enough, I’ve got to concentrate on the racing form.


LUCAS, HIS WORKING METHODS
Since he sometimes can’t sleep, instead of counting sheep he mentally answers the correspondence he’s behind on, because his guilty conscience has as much insomnia as he. The courtesy letters, those of passion, intellectual ones, one by one he answers them with his eyes closed and with great discoveries of style and showy structures that please him because of their spontaneity and effectiveness, which naturally increases his insomnia. When he falls asleep all his correspondence has been brought up to date.


LUCAS, HIS FRIENDS
What happens as you enter renders coherent description impossible, because as soon as you cross the threshold there’s a little girl who grabs you by the knees and covers your topcoat with spittle, and at the same time a little boy who has climbed up onto the bookcase in the foyer dives at your neck like a kamikaze, so that if you had the vague idea of coming with a bottle of cheap red, the instantaneous result is a gaudy puddle on the carpet.


LUCAS, HIS TRAUMATOTHERAPIES
Lucas was once operated on for appendicitis, and since the surgeon was a slob the wound became infected and it all went very poorly because in addition to the suppuration in radiant Technicolor, Lucas felt more flattened out than a dry fig.


LOVE 77
And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, they comb their hair they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.

Oh, Julio; oh, Lucas, all that bathing, powder, perfume, combing. Are those ladies in LOVE 77 ready for the narrator of my below prose poem?

BODY MAP
I told her “I’ll travel as far as you want.” And she promptly commanded me to kiss and caress every inch of her body. So I followed the map, starting down between the toes of Lisbon and Madrid, the ankle of Barcelona, the knee of Lyon, the thigh of Milan and made my way into Paris, a warm, moist city if there ever was one. I journeyed out, not missing any fold in the road, until I opened the crack of Rome and Venice and kissed every statue in Italy. Onward, I traveled, climbing the Swiss Alps, a heroic mountain climber. Onward, every onward! Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and beyond. Every city has its charm and every traveler worthy of the name must not miss what the natives have to offer.

( )