In The Saddest Pleasure, Inez Baranay continues her imaginative use of prose evident in her recent novel Between Careers. And

-Canberra Times, February 17, 1990

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[It] is like a tub of Neapolitan ice cream, three flavours and … [each] reader will find their favourite flavour. The first part is travel writing, the “saddest pleasure” of the title, and Baranay writes about it with intelligence, wit and an eye for rich detail. This style is impressionistic, snapshot, almost pushing into stream of consciousness at times, with intermingled memories, observations and some sharp social satire…. The second part of the book is “stories” … Baranay writes with intelligent insight about interaction, about self and sex … The Third part is ‘A Novella in Three Parts’. … The Saddest Pleasure [is] an alluring read, fragrant with Eastern experience, bitter edged with a relentless contemplated life.

-Australian Bookseller and Publisher, October 1989

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Her prose is marked by a languid mastery of words and an idiom that might at first look careless until one realises that there is not a sentence there that does not work. This trait could be characteristic of someone born displaced, for whom the English language was a new and challenging vehicle.

-Sydney Review, January 1990

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Inez Baranay’s The Saddest Pleasure .. is characterised by the same intelligence and freshness that marked her first book…. her prose is vivid, aphoristic, ideally suited to summing up her generation’s fantasies and follies - whether they concern finding the right hotel in India or living alone as a “new spinster” in Sydney. “You Don’t Whinge” takes a wry look at the cultural shifts in Australia that have made yesterday’s despised “reffos” today’s fashionable Europeans. It is one of the many pieces in The Saddest Pleasure which mark out Baranay as a talented and innovative writer.

-The Herald December 29, 1989

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