"A Labour of Love"

"It was her disgust and her contempt for a person who could live in the middle of such a smell that helped her look down into the yellowish eyes that stared at her through the square glass panes. Nothing could be read in them. They were receiving eyes, not giving eyes. They slowly moved all over her, like camera lenses, taking her in."

Tatiana and Colonel Klebb as depicted in the film version of From Russia With Love

Those eyes belonged to Colonel Klebb, one of the top ranking officials for SMERSH; which is a Russian abbreviation for 'Death to Spies'. Earlier in the book Colonel Klebb's character was described as cold and calculating. She put fear into the hearts of those she interrogated, even men. She used those eyes to observe the little body movements given by her subjects and then used that information to construct a verbal assault designed to extract information. She was good at what she did and the blonde girl pictured above, known as Tatiana, was in the gaze of those eyes. I loved how the author used imagery and comparisons to describe the eyes of Colonel Klebb. The intensity of their encounter was heightened because of this effect. Noticing descriptions like this in the fiction we read can help us imagine the characters and world that that they live in. That gives us much more enjoyment as readers because we are taken into the perspectives of those involved in the story and we feel a little bit of what they are feeling. A good author puts vivid descriptions like these throughout his/her books so that we as readers don't just hear a good story, but we go through an experience.