Bob Kibbee, a map and GIS librarian, writes about Olin Library's exhibition of maps related to the New Student Reading Project.

For the past four years, the Map and Geospatial Information Collection at Cornell's Olin Library has prepared a display of maps in support of the Cornell New Student Reading Project.

Nadine Gordimer's novel "The Pickup" moves through three distinct worlds. Gordimer doesn't want her geography freighted with preconceptions and constructs a geographic backdrop against which her characters, at turns rootless and yearning for roots, can play out their story. In doing so she leaves us with a difficult challenge: What maps can we display to enhance our understanding of the novel without adding more specificity than the author intended?

We begin in South Africa, which is never named in the novel, but offhand touches of description allow us to identify Johannesburg. South Africa as nation is almost incidental. Its geography, although unique, is not defining; its bureaucracy could be any bureaucracy. The city where the characters Julie Summers and Abdu meet could be any urban agglomeration in the developed world.

Post-apartheid South Africa is only glimpsed in the novel, but the maps in the exhibition provide some background for the history and the broad social forces at work in the city and the country. The maps help American readers unfamiliar with South Africa to orient themselves. We've used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to produce thematic maps of Detroit and Chicago -- perhaps the final stop on one of the main character's itinerary of escape.

Abdu's homeland is even more anonymous and unspecified. Five different reviewers have confidently asserted five different countries, a testament to Gordimer's skill at presenting an Islamic country that is at once generic and convincing.

We've decided to pretend that the country is Morocco. The tomb of Sidi Yusuf around which the place grew, according to Abdu, brings to mind the real tomb in Marrakesh, Morocco, and the environment of the Maghreb (the region of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), where pilgrimages are made to tombs of Sufi holy men. Marrakesh, quite a large city, couldn't be Abdu's village, so we postulate a place like Erfoud, east of Marrakesh and on the edge of the Sahara. The maps have been chosen to illustrate the many kinds of cartography that can represent a place like that, without insisting too strongly on the place itself.

The exhibition, on the lower level of Olin Library, runs through Sept. 22.