In me dorme un grido

In me dorme un grido is a reverent, heavily symbolic biographical novel about Niki de Saint Phalle and the creation of the Tarot Garden in Tuscany. It wants to be a novel about art, trauma, incest, motherhood, illness, feminist rage, magical thinking, creative collaboration, and the transformation of private horror into public wonder. Mostly, it is a solemn, over-decorated artist-saint narrative that turns every animal, card, wound, garden path, mirror, cigarette, dream, and childhood memory into a sign pointing back to the same idea: Niki suffered, therefore Niki built.

The book opens in 1977, with Niki arriving on the Caracciolo land in Garavicchio, searching for the place where she will create her immense sculpture garden. She is ill, breathless, recovering from lung damage caused by years of working with synthetic powders and toxic materials, but the novel never lets illness be merely illness. It is destiny, warning, purification, and proof that creation is eating her alive. She comes with a crude papier-mâché model and a vision: twenty-two monumental sculptures based on the Major Arcana of the tarot. She does not want a polite ornamental garden. She wants a place that can hold monsters and marvels, the things that kill and the things that cure.

The Caracciolo brothers, Carlo and Nicola, show her two possible sites. She follows a hare across the hill, loses the rose from her hat, and has a vision of a naked golden woman wrapped in coral-colored serpents. The land is revealed to contain Etruscan tombs. Niki decides that the dead are not hostile, that death leads back to life, and that this is the place. This opening already gives the book’s whole method away. The hare is not just a hare, the soil is not just soil, the tombs are not just tombs, the woman is not just a hallucination. Everything is the unconscious calling Niki to her final exorcism.