In A Migrant Heart, a contemplative book about one man’s faith in literature’s ability to anchor a life of shifting attachments and estrangements, Denis Sampson justifies the practice of memoir writing in revealing and, ultimately, self-fulfilling terms. “There has to be a need that is in search of a shape,” the Montreal literary critic and essayist argues. A Migrant Heart soars whenever it delves deeply into the intellectual and emotional intricacies of its author’s life, but flails in the search for a shape to this demanding examination.

Sampson’s life straddles the political and cultural histories of his native Ireland and adopted home of Quebec. His childhood in Ireland’s farming community in the 1950s and ’60s conjures up a world that has bypassed modernity. His father showed no interest in books, but his mother quickly realized that education and the English language might be her son’s salvation from the drudgeries of rural life and the Irish tongue.

Sampson would go on to study English in Dublin during the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and pursue a graduate degree at McGill University in the early 1970s – just as Quebec nationalism was gripping the nation. While the journey from Europe to Canada may be a familiar trope in our literature, A Migrant Heart stands apart as an intellectual record of displacement. Sampson finds his ballast, a term he borrows from Thomas Hardy, in literature, eventually writing critical studies of fellow Irish authors John McGahern and Brian Moore.

The problem remains one of shape: how to exercise authorial control over a narrative perilously at risk of succumbing to the “random-reflections” syndrome. It’s hard not to find the book rambling and repetitive, and not to be frustrated at missed opportunities for better storytelling, especially when various friends or mentors enter and exit Sampson’s inner drama.

Still, at a time when memoir writing has acquired a muscular, action-packed quality as evidenced by the proliferation of books about years of conquering this or escaping that, the cerebral aspect of A Migrant Heart is solid counter-programming.