ABOUT THE BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR
When the Owl Cries has been described by reviewers as "The Gone with the Wind of Mexico." It is a gripping, vivid story that takes place on a huge estate, an hacienda, at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The novel centers about the life of Don Raul Medina, soon to take over the management of the hacienda from his father, Fernando, who is now dying. Fernando has been a cruel hacendado, ruling with an iron hand, whip, and gun. Raul is caught in a complex web: his estrangement from his emotionally frail and disturbed wife, his love for the young blonde Lucienne, hacendada of a neighboring estate, and the turmoil and hardships they are plunged into during the Revolution. The colorful, descriptive panorama of the novel leads the reader into a first-hand experience as hacienda life came to an end as a result of the Revolution.
When the Owl Cries was originally published in 1960 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and was an immediate success. The book was listed by the New York Times Book Review in its Best-seller/Recommended column for 13 continuous weeks after its release. The novel received rave reviews across the country. Excerpts of a few of these reviews appear later in this introduction.
Readers may be interested in some personal background about the author and where When the Owl Cries was written. Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) was a fine artist and the author of numerous short stories, novels, and non-fiction works. He came to Mexico during WWII and developed a life-long interest in visiting haciendas throughout the country in order to make the first large-scale artistic and photographic record of these ancient, fascinating, but rapidly vanishing places. His interest was inspired by the realization that most of these old estates were rapidly crumbling and disappearing after the ravages of the Mexican Revolution had left them in ruins, and from the neglect that followed the Revolution as Mexican peasants dismantled many of the hacienda buildings for use as building materials.
From the mid-1940s until late in the 1980s, Bartlett visited more than 350 haciendas throughout Mexico. Many were remote and difficult to find and then to visit. He, and often with me as his young compañero, traveled by horseback, by car, boat, motorcycle, or on foot to visit these old estates. Some were completely abandoned, the roofs of the buildings having caved in, with gaping holes in their walls and trees growing up through their unsheltered floors. Some, in ramshackle condition, were still being lived in by poor Mexican families. Very rarely a select few were occupied or maintained in absentia by the descendants of their original owners, while a small number of the estimated original 8,000 haciendas have been converted into tourist hotels, schools, and government buildings.
There was no grant funding available for my father's lifelong project. It was a labor of love financed by his and my mother's meager savings, the frequent fate of creative artists. (My mother was Elizabeth Bartlett, well-known for her many published books of poetry.) During each hacienda visit, my father made sketches he later turned into finished pen-and-ink illustrations, of which he completed 350. The collection of hacienda illustrations was exhibited in more than 40 one-man shows in leading galleries, museums, and libraries in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition, he took more than a thousand photographs of the haciendas. Before his death in 1990, the University Press of Colorado published his non-fiction book, The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist's Record, which contains selections of his many illustrations and photographs, accompanied by a text that describes hacienda life and the history of the haciendas.
In 1959, thanks to my parents' friendship with Cuca Cámara, of the long-established Cámara family of Mérida, Yucatán, my father was offered the opportunity live on one of the family's haciendas, located outside of Mérida between the small towns of Motul and Suma. My father and I lived at the Hacienda Kambul while he completed When the Owl Cries. The Hacienda Kambul provided a very spartan existence: We slept in hammocks in a large bare room of what had been the casa principal, the main residence of the hacienda. The 20-foot-high ceilings and the thick adobe walls helped cool the hot and dry Yucatecan weather; in the mornings, swallows would fly through the opened ten-foot-high doors into the room, chitterling and swooping above our heads.
The author on horseback at the Hacienda Kambul