I was just thinking why Gaiman put the lime' scenes in the book. They are funny, but they can't be there just for this reason: it's too easy and Gaiman as a good myth-maker, taught us to cast always a look behind the more obvious meaning of things. I arrived to compare the scene with the part in AG, when Shadow is sacrificed, hanging from the tree. Shadow, through the ferocious ritual, loses his identity, he forgets his name (sorry if I don't remember well - I read the book three years ago) and through this death he's transformed, acquiring a new truth. He really follows the myth of the Yggdrasil and of Odin hanged nine days to reach knowledge.
In ANANSI BOYS there's more fun and comedy, so Gaiman choses a lime. Fat Charlie dismissed his identity and becomes "the man with the lime": he goes through a loss, to emerge new, and find another himself, who is only Charles, and who is at last able to understand his father. So the lime signs a passage from the human disaster that is Fat Charlie, to his godly and more adult counterpart... the lime as a means of transformation (again as I wrote on the critical thread I prefer AG)... what do you think?

I could be completely wrong, but I think the lime is just a lime. Very British sort of humor that - taking the mundane and making it extraordinary.
If you really want symbolism, here's one: Mr. Nancy is the guy with lemon yellow gloves in American Gods. The hat is new to Anansi Boys. Consider Lemons and Limes as a pair - similar, yet different. Mr. Nancy and Fat Charlie are father and son - similar, yet different. When FC finally takes on the aspect of the trickster, or shall we say put on his father's hat?, he does it with the lime. Which is what he inherited from his father - a lime green fedora. In that way, the lime symbolizes Anansi and what Fat Charlie inherited from him.
But really I think it's just a lime.

Can't be both? I mean: mostly I agree that the lime is just a lime, but I remeber that you can look at things in two different ways (it is suggested in the book). One thing can display various levels of interpretation, and what you said about the yellow gloves confirm the legacy of the God, just as in AG. Of course Odin is a more severe God than Anansi, and his son reach the identification with him dramatically (through the tree, just like Odin in the myth); while Anansi is "more fun": his son becomes like him acquiring something that remind us of the father, a lime. That is: just a lime and something else. This is, in my experience what myth generally do... A pomegranate is just a pomegranate and something else. Changing the god, the feeling must change. Cruel and dramatic for Odin; hilarious and funny for Anansi. What do you think?

They can be both, certainly. However, I was answering based on what I think Neil meant it to be. I was able to come up with a secondary meaning despite that. Neil has discussed this before in interviews/blog, how things he meant just as themselves were interpretted with symbolism he didn't intentionally put there. He finds that quite valid. Because I'm me and not him, I have more trouble accepting that.

I understand what you mean, and I also think that this kind of symbolism that I'm trying to analyze is an added one. That what books do. You don't go into reading "empty" or with the only intention to discover what was in the author's mind. Angela Carter said that when we read a novel we bring our experience in it, and so every novel changes a lot according to the person that is going into it. An italian poetess wrote a book based on her interpretation and rewriting of poems and authors she loved. She said that in this way, literature became a dialogue, in which new things can always be added. That's what I think: until you can add, interpretate, discover something it means that the book is an alive one. There's a dialogue.

I found THE quotation!

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms." ANGELA CARTER

There's another meaning for 'lime' in the Caribbean - it means when a group of friends or people get together for a somehting it's called a 'lime' - maybe Charlie was the man with the lime cos lots of people he knew (Coats, Rosie, Daisy, Spider, Rosies mum, Tiger, Mrs Higgler, Maeve Livingstone) - sounds like a good lime to me!!! the lime itself was just that - a lime :-)

The lime... oh god I can't do it. I can't possibly remark on the importance of a lime, and that's the real beauty of it really. I think it was just comic realief, cause in the end its all about limes really...

I liked the lime. I thought it was just a lime, some random and silly thing that becomes of central importance to a lot of nice Caribbean people who are probably equally random and silly (in the best sense of the word).

when i went to the London signing, Neil drew me a lime in my copy, and wrote Evildoers Beware.

*is jealous*

I suspect that Neil owed the lime a favor (or perhaps its family) and so he gave it a bit part in his novel. This has given the lime unprecedented exposure and what I suspect was a surprising amount of fan response. I would not at all be surprised if the lime soon had its own talk show or spinoff novel.

I second the above statement

I was thinking of the lime in terms of the other Interesting Objects of Mysterious Importance (bird feather, chunk of tongue meat, etc.) that were traded.

The lime was HIS object to give away, and he gave it to HER.

I was also thinking that it was funny.

One way to solve the mystery might be to read through and look at all the fruit mentioned...

(You throw fruit at Tigers. You can't trust people who eat wax fruit. Etc.)

Then again maybe it will just come to you in a dream....

Maybe the lime is just a lime, as previously suggested. Maybe it's protection lest Tiger should show up. Regardless of anything you want to read into it, it's funny, a good ongoing joke, and these days I don't go anywhere without my lime. Someday someone might actually get it...

Geez and I thought I over-analized stuff
the lime is exactly what you want it to be
nothing more nothing less

Oh - the part with the lime that I gaffawed at, and then re-read and gaffawed at again, was p325 when Charlie gives Daisy Rosie's old engagement ring, and Daisy says, "As long as you're not just doing it to get the lime back."

Good times.

First I can't believe nobody has mentioned this, and second I thought it was obvious

You put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both together, put the lime in the coconut then you'll feel better.

I think it helps if you just hold your breath and think like Dr. Who.