Manuel Argüello Mora was born in Costa Rica in 1834 and was raised by his uncle, Juan Rafael Mora. Graduated from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, he returned to Costa Rica to enjoy a minor judgeship in the administration of his uncle (1849-1859). When Mora fell Argüello followed him into exile. The two of them returned to Costa Rica in 1860 in a disastrously unsuccessful attempt on the part of Mora to return to power. “La trinchera,” the title story of the collection of stories under review, is one of Argüello’s accounts of this disaster, which culminated in the death of his uncle. Argüello himself lived to play a minor role in politics and occasionally to write for Costa Rican newspapers.
In his sixties Argüello cast aside his previously partisan approach and composed a series of vignettes on presidential politics. These, his best writings, were originally published in 1898-1899 and are gathered here by José Marín Cañas for republication. Cañas, a writer-politician in his own right, provides a scholarly introduction to the collection, and Carlos Meléndez, Costa Rica’s leading historian, adds explanatory and clarifying notes. These notes are necessary because Argüello wrote from memory and sometimes was guilty of basic inaccuracies.
Argüello’s episodes, furthermore, are superficial and unconvincing. They provide some of the backroom gossip concerning leading Costa Rican political figures of the 1860s but they probably exaggerate the role of the author and they tend to ignore ideological commitment and presidential policy. Two of the selections are semi-fictional, pale imitations of Pérez Galdos’ Episodios nacionales.
Except for the unfortunate scarcity of the political memoir in the national period of Costa Rican history it is difficult to justify the republication of these stories. Judged by accustomed standards of history and literature, they scarcely deserve to be singled out as models of historical or literary contributions.
